Omer_Intel's Journal: Intel's primary WLAN campus project

Hi all,
I want to dedicate this post to our Primary WLAN Campus project (PWC). This project that we do in collaboration with Cisco is a technology study activity that aims to come up with a design allowing complete buildings/campuses to move all users to WLAN as their primary method of network access.

There are many aspects to such a big endeavor and we have published a number of white papers on the details so I want to dedicate this post to the overall approach and challenges rather than the implementation details. There is a link to all our white papers in Intel IT operations home page at http://www.intel.com/IT
First - why do we do this? The simple answer is that with a highly mobile workforce people spend less and less time in their cube and so provisioning network drops and end points (computers, desk phones and so on) to known location provides less and less benefit and the best way is to create a ubiquitous service offering allowing users full access to their communications needs wherever they happen to be. The PWC efforts started with data, moved to voice and we are now working on video and planning off-campus connectivity as a next phase to be able to meet this vision. There are also cost benefits to this direction but I consider that a 'bonus' rather than the main driving force.

So how did we go about making something like this work?

First we need to consider the challenges: to 'unwire' the users we have to deal with any traffic that is used today in the LAN which means data, voice and video. This is a huge challenge because when comparing the WLAN to LAN the former has some clear disadvantages most notably in the fact that it is a shared media over a rather noisy and unshielded environment. This in turn means we need to pay special attention to security (the whole CIA - confidentiality, integrity and availability), to managing the components and the varying service levels in the face of interference and so on. We also have to support very sensitive traffic that requires quality of service (QoS) controls such as voice over IP (VOIP) which is highly impacted by delay, Jitter and packet loss and also incurs high overhead on the WLAN due to small packets.

After understanding the challenges we needed to come up with an architecture and design that will enable dealing with them: Proper product selection, careful deployment of access points, selection of suitable security solutions and development of management tools and practices are all vital parts of making this work.

Finally we 'hit the road' and started deploying our design in a major campus in the US hosting about 6000 employees. We started small with one building and data services only and in the course of about 2 years grew to a complete campus coverage capable of supporting data and voice and we are now dealing with video and looking forward to extending coverage off-campus and providing added services such as location based services (LBS).

This has been a terrific voyage with its full share of revelations, disappointments and moments of exhilaration. As a technical person I could not ask for more.

So what is your take on moving to WLAN as you main connectivity methods? Are you considering it? doing it? love to hear from you. -- Omer