University Hooks Schools Up with Wireless Education

The project is being sponsored by Texas A&M University, in partnership with DS3, Dallas, as well as the school districts and several government agencies. Tradeo Reyna, director of distance learning and continuing education at Texas A&M, said the high-bandwidth asymmetric network enables new functionality for distance-learning applications that are not available with conventional broadcast-only networks.

Instead of just pushing content to students, the wireless network enables interactive communication between students and faculty/administration via Web courses and videoconferencing, Reyna said. The network will allow high school students to take classes in other schools, and will provide learning opportunities to rural towns that lack resources. The network will also allow Texas A&M to offer support services such as admissions, financial aid programs and noncredit workforce training throughout southeast Texas.

About seven of 24 targeted school districts in rural south Texas are already on board, and the project's completion date is targeted for this summer. The wireless broadband solution recommended by DS3 made sense because many rural Texas school districts don't have the funding to pay monthly charges for T1 lines to connect to Texas A&M, Reyna said.

"This network has what's equal to 15 T1 lines as far as bandwidth is concerned," Reyna said. "So we're able to get not only video and audio out, but in the future hopefully we'll be able to get Internet service to some of those rural communities."

Reyna said the university will charge discounted fees to cover textbooks and instructor costs for participating school districts but will offer the network links at no charge.

Davis Sylvester, president and CEO of DS3, said the solution, based on Orthogon's OS-Gemini point-to-point broadband wireless Ethernet bridge, was easy to install and has performed reliably.

"Support is also a big issue for us because we're based in Dallas, but we have to support a large area. Orthogon has most of its management built into the product, but they have also extended additional customer support if there are any problems with the radios," Sylvester said.

The OS-Gemini is one of a burgeoning field of broadband wireless solutions that leverage coverage from the license-exempt 5GHz radio band to extend existing network infrastructures. OS-Gemini offers NLOS (non-line-of-sight) coverage in the 5.8GHz radio band and includes Orthogonal FDM (frequency division multiplexing), which distributes data over a large number of carriers that are spaced apart at precise frequencies.

One advantage to operating in the 5.8GHz radio band is that it's not nearly as crowded as the 2.4GHz radio band, where 802.11 wireless networking technologies are leveraged. Orthogon's OS-Gemini is targeted toward a range of applications, including backhaul and building-to-building connectivity, as a WLAN extension or a multisite mesh network.

Research firms such as the Burton Group also tout the ability of broadband wireless to allow wider availability of enterprise fiber networks and extend high-speed network access.

Sylvester said broadband wireless also represents an excellent opportunity to offer wireless networking to its budget-restricted education customers.

"It's a very big market and it's really just starting to form," Sylvester said. "Educational facilities are just starting to understand what they can do with wireless."