Kevin Marron
Friday, April 27, 2001
The metre-thick walls at Trinity College's venerable
junior-school building looked like an indomitable challenge when
staff at the Port Hope, Ont., private school set out to install a
new computer network.
Drilling holes and running wires was an expensive proposition
and they did not want to compromise the architectural integrity of
the 100-year-old building. Yet they wanted to give Grades 5 to 8
students access to a high-speed Internet connection and link them
to the wired Ethernet network used elsewhere in the school.
The solution was a wireless network that connects four classes
and a library, giving students unwired access to their school
Ethernet via 35 laptop computers.
The thick walls within the old school building required that
the service provider, Markham, Ont.-based Avaya Canada
Corp., install several access points to make sure that the
signal carried to all the areas where students would be
working.
As students move from one area to another, the wireless network
hands the signal from one access point to another in much the same
way as a cellphone system provides continuous coverage for users
on the move, says John Williams, director of data sales at Avaya
Canada.
"We've been able to do just about anything we need to do with
the wireless network and we haven't noticed any performance issues
whatsoever," says the school's academic co-ordinator, Blair
Keiser, noting that the junior-school students spend a lot of time
on their laptops working with digital images, often downloading
pictures from the Internet and later storing them on the school
network.
