Every fall, 12,000 new students flood the two campuses of Concordia University in Montreal. With them come the latest laptops, cellphones and trends for technology use, and it's Andrew McAusland's job to make sure Concordia's network and infrastructure deliver everything the young Facebookers require.
That's why in January, McAusland—Concordia's associate vice-president of instructional and information technology services—and his team made the school the first university in Canada to implement the 802.11n wireless networking standard, which hasn't even been ratified by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. It's the latest part of an ambitious agenda to keep Concordia ahead of the curve in delivering network infrastructure and services to students, faculty and staff. "We don't have the benefit of lag time that some organizations do, where you can watch a three-year cycle of equipment wash out," says McAusland. "Every year, you get 12,000 kids bringing in the latest stuff. You've got to keep up with it."
The school has so far upgraded 70 of its close to 300 wireless access points with faster, high-capacity 802.11n routers from Cisco. McAusland says the new technology enables the school to offer better connectivity and prepares it to deliver top speed to students bringing 802.11n-equipped laptops with them in fall. "[Our wireless network] has 95% to 96% coverage within the campuses, but students aren't evenly spread on campus," he says. "They congregate in the library or at coffee shops. The 802.11n allows for more simultaneous connectivity off the access points."
In addition to its wireless network, the school has also rolled out a package of Web services. For $8.99 a month, students can have network-based access to Microsoft Office, a translation service, a plagiarism detection service, 1 GB of storage, and the ability to book university equipment such as laptops and cameras via a portal, among other services. The package also provides them with access to the school's outdoor wireless network, which covers a one-kilometre radius around both campuses. For $9.99 a month, the school offers a telephony package that enables users to make and receive phone calls over the network. "An international student can have their Montreal phone number even before they leave China," McAusland says.
The telephony and services packages together have roughly 3,000 users, but McAusland expects to have 12,000 to 15,000 people signed up by 2010, at which point the cost of the services will be covered by subscriber revenue. "If students get here and these services don't exist, you have a real problem," he says. "Technology services in and of themselves won't recruit students, but they will retain them."
Next on the agenda is expanding the network to cover the area in between the school's downtown campus and its other campus, located to the west, in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. Students riding the shuttle bus between campuses will be able to connect to the network, and McAusland eventually hopes to use microwave technology to provide wireless connectivity anywhere students, faculty and staff live. "The idea is to create a full-service package within a closed Concordia environment that provides everything our users need: ISP, software over the network, storage, telephony and other services," he says.
The goal is for the total Concordia community of roughly 50,000 people to use the same network and services and be completely served by the school. "If I can standardize the tools within the client base, that allows me to have a standard expectation across the community, which is something we've never been able to establish," due to people using different networks and software, according to McAusland.
That level of consistency will position Concordia to easily upgrade its technology and services in preparation for the next wave of tech-savvy students. "In five years, our new students will have been born in 1995," McAusland says, "and there will be a marked difference in what they expect."
