Instead of rewiring 30 older buildings on campus, they began setting up 300 wireless access points in those buildings and in 72 others. Although they originally operated at much lower speeds, wireless local-area networks today run at 11 megabits per second. A student might wait about two seconds for a typical image file to open up, if the file is transferred across the network at a rate just under 11 megabits per second. The next generation of wireless networks will run at rates up to 54 megabits per second. But many administrators believe the advantages of being mobile and still connected to the campus network outweigh any disadvantages of speed.
Mobility is the key point.
Not everyone sees an inexorable move to laptops and wireless networks on every college campus, however. The president of Johnson C. Smith University, a historically black university, says her institution has experimented with wireless technology during registration. Because radio frequencies are shared among users of the network, any information sent or received over a wireless network can be intercepted. Carnegie Mellon advises its students and faculty members concerned about privacy to use encrypted applications, in addition to the encryption that authenticates users when they initially log on to the network. Campus administrators admit they have a host of other worries about wireless networks, too.