802.11 Wireless Support

NetOp School supports 802.11 wireless networking. All features (except for Wake-On-LAN which is not supported in the 802.11 specs) are supported. It is recommended that all wireless computers are associated to the same Access Point. Since many Access Points have low priority for broadcast packets, it is recommended to purchase Access Points with multicast capability, since we have seen an improvement in speed of up to 5 times in our test labs by using Multicast. It is recommended that all student and teacher machines will be using 802.11 wireless NIC’s; mixed environments don’t work as well.

Setup

Teacher and Students should use the pre-defined ‘Wireless’ communication profile, which sends smaller packets. This means that you should change from the default TCP/IP profile under Tools/Options/Connection.

On the Teacher side you’re prompted for an optional use of Multicast if possible. This is not necessary to setup on the Student side.

Performance

The speed of the teacher’s screen broadcasts to student computers will NOT be as good over a wireless network when compared to the performance over a wired network. There is no way to overcome this. A wired network can send broadcast and multicast data at 100Mbits per second. An 802.11 wireless network generally sends broadcast and multicast data at 1MBit per second (a mere 1% of the wired speed). In addition to the drastic bandwidth reduction of wireless networks, the Access Point architecture of 802.11 will quite often add significant propagation delays to broadcast and multicast data. (This is due to the Power Save architecture of the 802.11 world…) However, the NetOp School Teacher Broadcast feature will still work reasonably well. Even complex teacher screens should appear on student screens within three seconds. Simple teacher screen changes should appear almost immediately.

Special Hardware Requirements

Please make sure that all computers are using the latest NIC (Network Interface Connector) drivers available from the NIC vendor. The “world of wireless” is similar to the LAN environment of a decade ago. Wireless network drivers are being updated and improved almost monthly. Also, there are two basic types of Access Points:

Residential and Industrial. The easiest way to differentiate is with the price.

A “Residential” Access Point will generally sell for around $100 (i.e. LinkSys, DLink, Belkin, etc…). They work fine in a home environment where several computers will be sharing an Internet link and perhaps a printer.

The “Industrial” Access Point is designed to truly support 50 or more clients at the same time. They generally sell for around $300. Unless you really have less than five student computers, you want an “Industrial” class Access Point. This will benefit not only NetOp School, but general student computing as well.