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THE ORIGINS OF DARTMOUTH'S WIRELESSNETWORK CAN BE TRACED TO THEI PRIVATE STUDY OF A FORMER PROVOST.

Begun in a lab at Thayer, applied to the needs of an overworked provost and eventually funded by an ad hoc group of alumni, the route by which wireless came to Dartmouth is a model for future technological initiatives.

The story begins in 1999, when Larry Levine, William "Punch" Taylor and professor Dave Kotz '86 began thinking about ways to enhance Dartmouth's hard-wired network, which had just been upgraded at a cost of $3 million, with some wireless hubs. Thayer professor Ted Cooley '82, Th'88, had

already provided a working example with a smallscale wireless system at the engineering school-where a wireless system had been running since 1997—but the cost of something campus-wide was prohibitive.

Meanwhile, then-Provost Susan Prager, dependent on the Dartmouth College Information System network and trying to balance the demands of her job and her family, had become frustrated with the 56K dial-up access she had from the study of her Hanover home. When she asked Computing Services if they could install a faster connection, the answer was no—her house didn't belong to the College. But Levine, Kotz and Taylor realized that a wireless access point, if installed on a College-owned building across the street, would solve her high-speed needs. It did, and she became a fan.

At about the same time, at a Tuck/Dartmouth eForum event in Boston in January 2000, Levine met with Matt Schmitz '90, a research engineer at Cisco Systems, the Internet networking giant lo- cated in San Jose, California. The director of com- puting told Schmitz that Dartmouth was beginning to look seriously into a wireless system, and won- dered if he could help. Schmitz did a lot more than that. By November he had gathered a list of more than 20 Dartmouth alums and parents working for Cisco and talked each of them into purchasing-and donating to Dartmouth—at least one $1,299 Aironet 340 Series Access Point (AP) using their 75-percent employee discount. By early 2001 Dartmouth had nearly 50 of the initial 300 APs it needed for the system, with more to come in the following months. By all accounts it was this outpouring of alumni and parent generosity, combined with Prager's top-level support, that tipped the scales for the project. By April 2001 Dartmouth's wireless network was operational.