Wireless is slowly starting to catch on in academia, and mobile computing is part of the curriculum at Seton Hall, which has 4,500 undergraduates plus about 5,000 graduate, law and part-time students. The wireless LAN went live in September, giving students and faculty more network coverage in a greater number of places on campus. "It doesn't replace our wired coverage -- it's a supplement to our mobile-computing program," says Bernd Walter, executive director of IT services for Seton Hall. The wireless LAN fills in where the wired backbone isn't as widely available, such as in some large amphitheater lecture halls, which may not have enough wired ports for the entire class, he says.

About 80 percent of the campus now has wireless coverage, according to Joseph DiVito, senior network engineer for Seton Hall. And three out of every five courses at Seton Hall are computer-enabled, meaning the classrooms support the students' laptops with Ethernet jacks and power plugs. The students also can access the university's intranet portal through Blackboard.com for e-mail and the class syllabus.

Some classes, like those that meet just once a week, for instance, are conducted in part over the network. Students can "virtually" attend from any Ethernet or wireless port. "Classroom time is valuable to faculty members, so during the other days they are putting online small video clips to augment a discussion, along with quizzes, tests and online chatting with instructors," DiVito says.

The university's wireless LAN runs on Symbol Technologies' 802.11b-based AP (access point) wireless bridges in most of the academic buildings, in the lounges of its residence halls and in other buildings. Each dorm room is hardwired to the network backbone but doesn't have a wireless link. Dorm lounges, however, do have wireless links.

The wireless LAN poses some labor challenges for Seton Hall. "If I have to replace an access point, it's more physical labor," DiVito says. And then there's the delicate balance with security. As a university, Seton Hall needs to make its network available to its resident, as well as part-time, faculty members and students who plug in with their own laptops that didn't come from Seton Hall's IBM ThinkPad laptop program. At the same time, the university also needs to protect its network and users.

"Our security is working," Walter says, "but it's not the kind of security you see at a corporate or government level."

Seton Hall, meanwhile, has been building out its physical network capacity, starting with an aggressive fiber installation several years ago. The university just completed an upgrade from its ATM backbone to Gigabit Ethernet and is now beginning to add VoIP (voice over IP). Like many organizations with ATM, the university had maxed out the pipe and was looking to add bandwidth for less money and with reduced management overhead. Next summer, Seton Hall will introduce video on demand to its network, which, among other benefits, will let instructors use a laptop and overhead projectors to bring video clips to their lectures.