Ladies and gentlemen of the WLAN industry, here are the problems with wireless networking in college dorms, and a head start on how you can develop a solution.
Problems:
- College dorms are usually covered by the same enterprise 802.1x network used on the rest of campus, but are really more residential feeling at the operational level.
- Wireless printing doesn't work where you have hundreds of anything-goes printers with no coordination on the same WLAN- and consumer-grade $40 printers don't support enterprise security.
- Game consoles and Bonjoury toys also are fraught with problems and usually need yucky work-arounds on the business network usually found in dorms, or get relegated to the wired network.
- Rogues get installed to get around what campus WLAN can't easily provide
- Ditching the enterprise WLAN and letting students bring their own wireless routers is a recipe for chaos and angst from the RF and support perspectives.
Solution:
It's not cut and dry, and my enormous cranium hasn't yet formed the whole solution. But it starts like this:
- Keep all the benefits of a centrally-managed solution. RF coordination, central monitoring and configs, etc- whether cloud-based or local not so important here.
- Study PowerCloud's Skydog network paradigm. Everything about it doesn't fit the dorm challenge, but a lot of it does. If you can treat each dorm room as an apartment, with a dedicated SSID or some other compensating control (not all dorm rooms would need their own AP) we'd be off to a good start
- Maybe use elements of Ruckus' Secure Hotspot in a way that lets a single student or roommates have all of her/their gadgets in a little "private WLAN" all somehow using the same private PSK.
- Make sure any one student's most common gadgets can all interact in their own little WLAN space (even Bonjour toys and printers), that it's all easy to self-setup, and can be administered by WLAN admins if trouble hits.
- With all device types accomodated, the reasons for rogues are eliminated.
- Make sure students can't get to each other's stuff, but allow for on-demand temporary access when sharing is desired.
- Make sure that however it all gets put together, the RF environment is still well-coordinated.
There- that was easy. Now someone just needs to build the code and interfaces...
