University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

The University Wireless network has become a critical resource for the UB community. The network is relied upon daily by faculty, staff, students, and researchers to provide mobility to their networking. The network provides mobile communication capabilities for a multitude of services, including Internet access, email communication, and many others. The network is being continually relied upon for increasingly more critical services. For example, Faculty Staff and Students are using it for meetings, for doing homework, for e-mail and for general communication with others. It will become even more important as we move other services onto it like PDA's, handheld devices and wireless phones. Due to the increased importance of the network, it is now more crucial than ever that we make the network as reliable, robust, and cover as many areas as possible.

UB*Wi-Fi is a centrally-funded initiative with two parts. The first part is to upgrade all existing wireless devices to support Both the Wireless "G" and Wireless "A" standards and to expand wireless coverage. Specifically, we will be replacing the "B" cards in all access points with a wireless "G" card. We will also be adding a wireless "A" card in all access points that need it. The replacement of "B" radios with "g" radios and the addition of "A" radios started in March of 2007 and was mostly completed by November of 2007. It included the upgrade of 259 access points and the replacement of 62 access points.

In the second part of the initiative we will provide complete wireless coverage in each building, one building at a time, over the course of 6 years. This works out to installing roughly 300 access points per year. As of October 2008 it has been determined that we will only install 802.11N access points going forward. This is because the 802.11N technology represents a significant improvement in performance over the older technologies.

At the end of year 1 (July 1st 2008) we completed 8 buildings. We installed 288 new access points which brought our total installed to 739. We covered approximately 1,405,078 square feet here at UB.

At the end of year 2 (July 1st 2009) we completed 16 buildings. We installed 365 new access points which brought our total installed to 1033. We covered approximately 2,391,991 square feet here at UB.

We will use this web page to provide updated status information regarding our progress and tentative schedule. The original order (published in March of 2007) was determined by taking numerous factors into consideration, including the number of existing Access points and the locations commonly requested for expansion. It is important to note that the schedule is only tentative, and the order could change due to various circumstances. At this point it is difficult to predict how long it will take to get complete coverage, but 6 years (2008-2013) is probably a good estimation.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding the initiative or the
proposed schedule, please feel free to contact the UB Wi-Fi Project Manager, Jerry Bucklaew jpb@buffalo.edu.