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Wireless
LAN Loan Notebooks to Carry Students Away
By
Noel Laam
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The wireless LAN of
the University was formally launched on 15 March 2000 after the
Inauguration Ceremony co-organised with Lucent Technologies, the
wireless LAN solution provider of the project. This event has
gained rather handsome publicity and was well covered in the newspapers
as the City University is the first tertiary institute in Hong
Kong that has the campus wireless LAN in place.
Since the existing wired network
can no longer satisfy the emerging demand of our students, the
wireless LAN seems to be the right choice ahead. At the moment,
200 Access Points supporting 1,000 concurrent connections have
been spread over in more than 120 classrooms and public areas
on campus, including the Library, Wei Hing Theatre, Student Canteen,
the 4/F Mall, Late Reading Room, Covered Terrace and academic
departments. It is planned that 100 more Access Points will be
installed in the coming summer and by then 1,500 concurrent connections
will be supported throughout the campus.
This wireless alternative means students
can access the Internet, view video-on-demand, participate in
self-learning courses, attend live lectures broadcast on-line,
work on assignments, retrieve information, enroll in academic
registration, and join on-line forums etc. anytime and anywhere
within the campus.
In order to enable our students to
enjoy the full benefits of the wireless environment, a loan pool
of 200 notebook computers, with a LAN card installed in each,
for a maximum loan period of 24 hours has been set up for students.
The notebooks are provided and maintained by the Computing Services
Centre (CSC), while the daily loan pool service is operated by
the Facilities Management Office (FMO). With such a notebook in
hand, students can be connected to the campus network or the Internet
almost everywhere on campus. A similar loan pool of 50 notebooks
is also run in the Library (LIB), and students can borrow one
to use anywhere inside the LIB. For students/staff who already
have a compatible PC, the CSC has some LAN cards in store as well
and they can borrow the cards from the same FMO counter that manage
the loan pool. To supplement all the above, the CSC has set up
a wireless LAN Help Desk to answer enquiry from users.
The wireless LAN will definitely
be the computing setting that the world will go for. With the
support of the University, departments are encouraged to buy notebooks
to take advantage of this brand-new and advanced unwired environment.
