Universities adopt 802.11n, but is it too early

Over the last week I have seen several articles talking about the university deployments of 802.11n wireless networks. The most notable of these was Duke and Cisco’s claim to have the world’s largest wireless deployment, “which will cover more than six million square feet of Duke’s Durham, N.C., campus will comprise an architecture of more than 2,500 wireless access points.“

It’s not a surprise that universities would be the first to turn to 802.11n. Universities are the ISPs for the savviest population of Web 2.0 users on the planet. According to a Network World article, universities also have a ready base of users with over 35% of students having 802.11n-compatible wireless cards in the case of Miami. Of course, what they don’t say is whether these users can run at the 802.11n speeds or whether they’ll just default back to 802.11g speeds.

With all of the positives expressed in these articles by various universities, it would be nice to hear some of the deployment or management problems they have experienced. So far in my hunt for both sides of the story, I have only found the positive from university officials and the negatives are from people without connections to the Duke campus. In this vein, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of eWeek does provide some good insight and balance to the pie-in-the-sky view of 802.11n.

Obviously Cisco is throwing a lot of resources, both technical and PR behind the installation, but it would have been nice to have read about any technical or installation issues the Duke IT staff has faced. Other than knowing that a few universities have deployed 802.11n, there’s little else for IT professionals to take away.

If anyone does have any experience with 802.11n - positive or negative - I’d be interested to hear.

The best articles on 802.11n during this time was actually a slide show on the ten things to know about 802.11n. and a more comprehensive posting by Andrew Garcia.