TechTalks Event
Wireless Networking Directions
with Charles "Chuck" Bartel, Carnegie Mellon University
October 21, 1999
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Imagine every student, every staff person, every member of the faculty being able to find their own, out-of-the-way nook on your campus and always having complete Internet access by simply turning on their laptop computer without plugging in to anything - even in the basement of a building. That's what the home campus for this week's guest expert is planning and creating right now. What are the goals for wireless computing? Which pitfalls must be avoided? Can it completely replace wired connections? What are the current and future technology options? How much does it cost? Who has to buy in, and will they?
Chuck will describe CMU's experience and help you generalize from his experiences so far. Listen to CREN's Tech Talk at your desktop and email your questions to the experts at expert@cren.net. FYI, here's a CMU campus map and a recent CMU article about its wireless plans.
Guest Expert
Charles R. "Chuck" Bartel is Director of Operations for the division
of Computing Services.
He joined Carnegie
Mellon in 1979 first working in the
Electrical & Computer Engineering Department. He later headed
the Data Communications group during the deployment of one of the
largest integrated heterogeneous Local Area Network facilities in
the world. He has performed as Project Director for the Network
2000 project as well as Project Manager/Team Leader in
the creation of the campus' Computer Recycling Center. He was Lead
Negotiator for the campus' telecommunications system contract, a
project that led the way for the introduction to the campus of enhanced
telecommunications services such as video conferencing, voice mail,
CATV and satellite uplink capabilities. More recently, he was Project
Director for the
ADSL trial and both phases of the Wireless
Andrew project. Chuck is active in a number of professional
associations, publishing and speaking frequently on networking issues.
Co-Hosts
Howard Strauss, Manager of Academic Applications at Princeton
University, is TechTalk's Technology Anchor.
Co-Host Judith Boettcher is CREN's Executive Director.
Together, Howard and Judith will ask the really tough questions—and
relay the questions you email to them at expert@cren.net.
Background & Resources
- The most recent previous Tech Talk session in this hot higher education IT area was only a few weeks ago - Wiring for a Wireless Campus with Joel Hartman and Ron Eaglin. It is archived in audio and a transcript is also avalable for your perusal. An earlier Tech Talk with Alex Hills - last Spring - shared the same title as the current one and is also available in the archives. Hyperlinks to additional resources from those previous Tech Talks are not duplicated here but they are, of course, still available on those archived event pages.
- A recent item in Educom Review entitled LMDS: A Fixed-Wireless Opportunity for Colleges and Universities is of interest and it points to an ongoing project at Virginia Tech.
- Lots of pertinent information will, of course, be available at Educause'99 next week in Long Beach, CA USA, including very specifically, concurrent sessions: Coming Unwired: Making a Wireless Network Happen, Wireless University: Why PCs Without Wires Are the Future of Campus Academic, Administrative, and Student Computing, and a poster session entitled Wireless Laptops for Loan: Successful Implementation and Ongoing Maintenance of a Wireless Network in an Academic Library Setting. A current issues roundtable on Wireless Networking: Is It Right for Your Campus? will be also conducted by Judith L. Lilly of Virginia Tech.
You may be fascinated to read the ideas about "wireless" of a thinker from what seems like a long, long time ago in the new book Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium by Paul Levinson. �
