A plug for Ball State

You don't need one: The campus is judged best in the U.S. for wireless Web access

By Erika D. Smith

Would you like to watch a college football game live on your laptop while you're stuck doing homework in a basement laboratory?

Or identify the flower you're looking at without getting up from a bench in the arboretum?

If you're a student at Ball State University, you can.

When it comes to putting up points for wireless Web access and using them in ingenious ways, even off-campus, Ball State has every university in the nation beat, according this year's Most UnwiredCollege Campuses survey by Intel Corp. - College Football -

The midsize Muncie university came in No. 1, topping Indiana University-Bloomington -- last year's No. 1 school -- which didn't even make this year's list.

Ball State also surpassed Purdue University, last year's No. 2 school, which ranked No. 15 on this year's survey.

"I am very pleased that Ball State is included on this list with a number of high-tech institutions," said O'Neal Smitherman, vice president of information technology for Ball State. "I don't want to give the impression that we've accomplished this and now we can rest on our laurels. Technology changes constantly." - College Football -

Truth is, wireless Web technology, better known as Wi-Fi, hardly seems high-tech anymore.

It's becoming more and more common, both on and off college campuses, for people to whip out their laptops and go online at coffeehouses and public parks. Students expect wireless Web service to be on campus when they enroll.

"Last year, it was almost a novelty," said Bert Sperling, principal author of the survey. "This year, it's almost expected." - College Football -

Sperling examined nearly 1,000 colleges across the United States. The top 50 were ranked based on the amount of Wi-Fi coverage, how the technology was used, the number of undergraduate students enrolled and the computer-to-student ratio.

Colleges with as few as 1,000 students were considered. That's quite a change from the 2004 survey, when Sperling studied only a few hundred large universities.

The change reflects a rush to the technology by smaller schools, such as Ball State. Schools that didn't continue deploying Wi-Fi at a breakneck pace slid in the rankings as others blew by.

"The surprise is just how quickly Wi-Fi has been implemented," Sperling said. "Even small schools without much of a budget have been able to implement it."

At Ball State, wireless access points, which broadcast signals to get on the Web, began going up in 2002. But most of the campus wasn't covered until this year. - College Football -

Wi-Fi is accessible in all of the academic, classroom and administrative buildings, plus the commons areas of most residence halls, athletic venues and grassy knolls adjacent to those buildings.

It has more than 625 wireless access points spread across about 600 acres.

"Students can work on projects wherever they are," Smitherman said.

But what really sets Ball State apart is how it uses the technology. The university treats its network almost like a science experiment. In some ways, it's an extension of the decades-old Middletown Studies. - College Football -

Those studies, conducted by Robert and Helen Lynd, established Muncie as the most studied city in the United States and the "average" American town.

Now there's Digital Middletown -- an ongoing project that examines how average Americans use technology. Ball State encourages new and broad applications of its Wi-Fi network for research and development.

For instance, Ball State extended its wireless network to two elementary schools to see how students react to lessons with streaming video and other perks that come with ultra-high-speed Internet access. And it's testing even faster wireless technology -- called WiMAX -- at various spots on and off campus. - College Football -

"We need to extend that knowledge (of the Middletown Studies) and see what middle America looks like in a digital age," Smitherman said. "How does middle America respond to that?"

So far, Ball State has spent $500,000 to $600,000 putting up wireless access points.

Ball State has an advantage, though, because of its smaller size, said Mark Bruhn, associate vice president for telecommunications at IU. - College Football -

It took 1,000 wireless access points to blanket the core of the Bloomington campus because it's so much larger that Ball State.

Still, the fallen No. 1 university has been covered in Wi-Fi since early 2004. Now it is concentrating on outlying areas where students congregate.

Still, IU isn't deploying wireless access points at the super-fast pace of the past.

"As theses colleges essentially catch up with us," Bruhn said, "we're not going to be able to compete in that way." - College Football -

Purdue is in the same boat.

"It's much easier to set up a network on a smaller campus than one the size of the city like Purdue," said Steve Tally, senior communications manager for Purdue's information technology department.

Purdue's campus spans about 250 acres and 97 percent of it is Wi-Fi accessible. That includes the stadium, where students can look up players' biographies and statistics during sporting events. - College Football -

"We'll have to agree to disagree," Tally said of Purdue's No. 15 spot on the Intel survey. "I think our network is unsurpassed in the world."

In a few years, Sperling said such arguments over rankings wouldn't matter.

All colleges will have wireless Internet access because students will want to stay connected all the time. - College Football -

Wi-Fi will be as ubiquitous as the cell phone, he predicted. And the ways it will be used -- whether for taking tests or collecting data for experiments -- will have no bounds.

"That's the neat thing about Wi-Fi," Sperling said. "It's like engineers inventing a tool and people finding unique ways to use that tool."

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