No one keeps figures. But Tony Mordosky, past president of the Association of Telecommunications Professionals in Higher Education, estimates that less than 5 percent of campuses are fully wireless. Scores of schools are already testing wireless technology or equipping specific buildings to supplement their traditional wired networks. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln recently equipped its student union. Business schools at Purdue and Vanderbilt went wireless over the past year, and the University of Kansas's law school will do so soon.
Larger schools can do so for a few million dollars.
Greenville also found going wireless cheaper than extending wires to dorm rooms located blocks away from campus. To cover the entire 26-acre campus except for one parking lot and some remote athletic fields, technicians installed 60 access boxes along the walls or ceilings of dozens of buildings. Those boxes are slightly bigger than a smoke detector, with one or two antennae the size of a pen. When a student is within range, the laptop automatically connects with a nearby access point, sending and receiving Internet traffic at up to 11 megabits per second, or 200 times faster than the speediest telephone modem. Traffic moves from that access point to central servers through regular wiring.