Ball State University students have only a week to take advantage of faster speeds and better signals for wireless Internet before the university concludes a six-month research study.
Ball State is the first place in the United States to test WiMAX, a more powerful form of wireless Internet access, O'Neal Smitherman, vice president of information technology, said.
WiMAX provides a stronger signal with faster connection speeds at a greater distance compared to the old WiFi network, he said.
"The primary benefit [for Ball State] is it's very cost effective for populated areas that aren't very dense," Smitherman said. "We want the rest of the world to see Ball State as having its students being very technologically literate. We want them to see what's going on here. That'll make the students' degrees more valuable."
Ball State has worked with Digital Bridge Communications, a Virginia-based wireless service provider and Alvarion Ltd., an Israel-based wireless equipment manufacturer, Smitherman said.
Ball State has regularly reported results back to both companies, he said.
"We've been involved very heavily with wireless on campus for some time," Smitherman said. "Intel ranked us number one in the whole country."
The university began testing WiMAX in September after the Federal Communications Commission licensed the school to use the signal frequency required for WiMAX's equipment, Smitherman said. The testing will end Feb. 15 when the license expires, he said.
Ball State needed licensing to operate within the 3.5 gigahertz-wave frequency the equipment uses because that is the same frequency the U.S. military uses, Smitherman said. The university will then test WiMAX at a 2.5 gigahertz frequency, which does not require licensing, he said. The 3.5 gigahertz frequency is already commonly used in Europe, he said.
The previous WiFi wireless network at Ball State required 1,100 access points, each with a 1,500-foot signal, which covered Ball State's 700-acre campus, Smitherman said. WiMAX only requires one access point with a signal that can potentially range as far as 30 miles, he said.
The university does not plan to replace the WiFi network with WiMAX but will combine the two, he said.
"With the first WiMAX deployment, we currently have about a two-mile range," Smitherman said. "We can further this as equipment improves. We at Ball State are the first to test the equipment as it improves."
WiFi signals are diminished inside buildings because of walls, furniture and other obstacles, Smitherman said.
Brad McCoy, network integration manager for the office of wireless research and mapping, said WiMAX has multi-path signals that can move around, bounce off of or even penetrate dense objects that weaken WiFi signals.
WiMAX also provides fast connection speeds, Smitherman said. WiFi has a potential of 54 megabits per second compared to WiMAX, which has a potential of 150 megabits per second. The more computers there are using an access point, the slower the connection speed gets. Most computers average about 12 megabits per second with WiMAX, he said.
McCoy said a team of researchers from Ball State has tried to determine the signalling and bandwidth from different distances from the antenna. An antenna was placed on the roof of the LaFollette complex as a base station, he said.
The team drove to different places in Muncie and monitored the signal and connection speed from each point, McCoy said. The further away from the base station the researchers were, the weaker the signal was, but they went as far as 2.5 to three miles and still had a usable signal that was comparable to a cable modem, he said.
The signals from the base station are able to cut through snow clearly, but have a little more difficulty when it rains, Smitherman said.
Student research assistant Josh Shasky said the main problem the research team found was foliage during autumn.
"The only problem we've been running into is that it works better in the winter when the leaves are gone," he said. "It would work perfectly in a wide-open area like a desert."
Besides assisting with the road testing, Shasky was one of about eight people who also placed a unit in his home, he said.
"It's a pretty quick setup, just plug and play," he said. "It works great, way faster than a cable modem."
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