Hi,
Mount Holly School has a computer lab in every classroom, sort of, 18
iBooks travel the school in a cart populated with enough chargers for
all so that they get plugged in as soon as they have been used. (it is
some sort of horizontal filing cabinet with vertical slots and I
jammed all the chargers in the back and have the cords hanging just in
the right place for the machines at rest) 15 of these are the old
clamshell units and we just replaced the batteries after three full
years of use. 3 are white ones, due to their age all are running
802.11b cards so we have 8 original airport basestations in the
building for full coverage. We needed overlap due to the lower
saturation point of 802.11b which begins to lag with over five or six
machines on at the same time. If you are starting now go .11g it will
support many more units and allow for more robust LAN data transfers
(web access is no sweat as your telecomm speeds can't keep up with
11.b anyway). If you are saddled with less intelligent PC laptops
(hopefully not Centrinos stuck at 11.b) get 11.g PC-cards, once they
are set up they should work very nearly as well as Macs (only in
reference to the connectivity of course). I am not as prejudiced about
the access points, there are very good and less expensive units than
the Apple Extreme, however I opted to continue to spend more on the
airports as you can configure every one in the building from one
screen simplifying naming, IP addressing and any other administration.
DLink, Linksys etc have entry level dual band units for as little as
$79. up to just a little over $100. If you do spend between $250. and
$400. you can get bona fide workgroup access points that will support
50 users handsomely. Tip, in a multi-access point environment you may
want to manually address all the laptops so there is no DHCP confusion
as they move about the building and it takes some network load off
when there are 15 laptops booting up simultaneously. HUGE POINT, an
access point can be mounted to a cart and anywhere there is a network
jack there can be a computer lab! They work great, you'll love them.
Good luck,
Ed
On Apr 15, 2004, at 1:10 PM, Joe Lemaire wrote:
Hello,
I was wondering how people are using wireless in schools. We are
thinking
about maybe adding some wireless labs or something to that extent, and
just
wanted to see what pros and cons other people have run into. Also, if
you
are/have used it, what equipment would you recommend/not recommend?
Thanks,
Joe Lemaire
IT Technician
St. Albans Town Educational Center
