Selecting Wifi for a school

Selecting Wifi for a school is a minefield of choice and vendors who are "experts" in Wifi professing that their solution is the right one for your school. The biggest problem is that many educators and supporting staff have little experience of performance Wifi short of the type that came with their home broadband. This guide will give you and idea of how it works and questions to ask.

Here is a quick Wifi primer as a google presentation as given to an ISANet slam

Wifi primer

There are 3 real rules for Wifi

• How many radios can I see with signal strength > -65 dBm (minimum) as more visible radios means more available bandwidth *BANDWIDTH is WHAT YOU NEED IN A SCHOOL*
• More signal strength = more speed as the bit rate falls with distance
• does the system I have bought move clients to other nodes intelligently as the radios get loaded.

There are currently 2 vendors I use to meet the above requirements these are:-

Xirrus and Ubiquity Unify

I use Xirrus where I need Roll Royce performance and Unify where I need to fill holes or install wifi in an "Awkward" building.

When Dealing with Suppliers

• Wifi vendors typically send salesmen who rarely really know the "techy" stuff
• Always tell them that they have to meet and demonstrate they have met your performance specs (is amazing the amount of vendors who will not provide performance data after install)
• In high density areas ask for 60 devices all pulling 600Kbps as your worst case (this will make them go pale but you will need this if you are doing video or domain logins.)

User admin and history lesson

Sleepy Friday somewhere in Plymouth

On this particular Friday I am sat with my Zenbook flipped open running its customary Ubuntu Unity 12.04 with a terminal box open about to secure shell in to the main fileserver to create some new Teacher Accounts. There are three students sat by me who should be working on something that was set by the class teacher, but were generally chatting about non ICT related  topics. The student closest to me seeing the shell box leans over and asks "Wassat sir?" I explained it was a way to do some programming to automate tasks, in this case user creation, my response was met with a "Oh" and after a moment the young lad said "What like?". Over the next 5 minutes he watched as I showed him how to echo "Hello World" and a couple of loops in a BASH script, before the conversation at the table turned to the other two lads.

History Lesson 

The three lads at the table were now talking about a documentary they had seen the previous evening about a king who had been murdered by an assassin who hid in the cesspit under his royal toilet, apparently with a pike. I asked about pikes and the conversation turned to Infantry with pikes against Cavalry charges, with me trying to get them to imagine what it would be like with 1000+ thundering horses bearing down on you in a wet field on a winters morning. At the end of the lesson I went off to do another job and returned later in the day to help with the Minecraft group that ran on a Friday afternoon, to my surprise the three students that had been sat around the table in the morning avoiding their ICT work were back after opting for ICT for the afternoon, even more to my amazement two of the lads were looking at Cavalry and Infantry on google and the third was halfway through a bash scripting tutorial!

And the real kicker........ They could have been playing minecraft instead.

There's a storm coming

In The Begining

The web is undeniably the single most important communication tool of the 21st century, it was designed to use a simple markup script called HTML that was served over HTTP/S, any program capable of decoding this markup could render and output a pictorial representation of the page, in one fell swoop the swapping of information became cross platform and multi device.

Caught on the hop

The web caught many big players such as Microsoft and IBM completely by surprise these mega corporations of the Information Technology world struggled to see why anyone would want to swap their copy of Office 95 or Lotus Notes with a poorly rendered feature incomplete mess that was HTML and at that time in 1995 that's what it was, but what the giants of computing failed to understand was the fact that because the source code could be studied, copied, improved and republished, unlike a word document the cost of entry to the web was essentially low or free. No longer did some clever hacker have to reverse engineer the document format in order to remain compatible as all the changes were in plain sight.

Terrified!

Microsoft responded to kill the web by attempting to control it as an open format means anyone who can code could write a parser for the web and compete on an even keel with them, most dominant companies would respond in this way. For large companies control of a technology means you can dictate platforms, standards and ultimately the price of accessing a technology, the web made this impossible to do so it had to die.

Fast Forward to 2010

The web is now a secure and well defined technology with most of the major players conforming to standards and the search giant google forcing through new innovation in the API's available it seems the web is to be an unstoppable force..... but wait!

The Rise Of The App

The release of the iPhone and iPad brought a new idea...... The App Store, a convenient place to get programs designed to lever the most out of your new shiny geek toy, and place money in to the pocket of the App Store operator (Not that this is a bad thing. Everyone needs to earn a living). Before the rise of the App you could view any content on the internet with just a webbrowser, bbc.co.uk, cnn.com, techcrunch.com all webbrowser, but now each site could have an "app" all with different interfaces, ways of working and more importantly a way of charging should the need arise.

The app brought another restriction, the loss of the ability to view the code, the sharing of the way it worked all locked down and controlled for the few developers who paid for the development kit, each developer learning from scratch, not being able to freely examine each others work for best practice. The App non-cross platform making it harder to port software to other machines, after all it's not in the App Store provider's interest to allow you to port to competing platforms, The App store where the operator gets to decide what goes on it, and can remove things at a whim *cough* google maps *cough*.

The Web is Open Source

I believe the web is the new open source / open research / scientific method way of working, the web encourages sharing, conformance to standards and is inclusive to hardware platforms, it is my belief we should make the web and its supporting technologies the bedrock of our future education and govermental systems, as it is this digital inclusion, this technology, that empowers users rather than companies.