From vision to reality
As Accenture Labs experiments with wireless and Web services, Case Western deploys 802.11a
FROM PAGE MILL ROAD in Palo Alto, Calif., to Sophia Antipolis in France — just a few minutes drive from Cannes in your Jag — Accenture Labs, the giant consultancy, is busily looking beyond the current economic climate to the economic recovery as it prepares for the next wave of innovation.
I spoke with Dadong Wan, senior researcher at Accenture. Unfortunately for Wan, he is neither in Sophia Antipolis nor in sunny Palo Alto. His office is located in Chicago.
Nevertheless, Wan and his team are working on some cool stuff that combines wireless and Web services, and he is currently demonstrating it to some of the larger retailers in the United States.
The retailers, mostly home-improvement centers, are interested in kicking customer service up a notch by using next-generation cell phones and PDAs in DIY (do it yourself) situations.
Here’s how it works. Let’s say a home owner wants to buy weather stripping using a public UDDI — that’s the Web services directory standard for listing service providers. UDDI not only lists retailers who sell weather stripping; it describes in detail their services. Some retailers also might have a small Web service application that can walk a buyer through the installation process or even connect the buyer to a store expert.
If a buyer cannot figure out what to do at a given point, the system would connect him or her to a store expert via video. With the user pointing the camera built into his or her PDA or cell phone at the problem area, the store expert could walk the buyer through the problem.
Wan says Accenture has completed the first stage of the project; the next phase is to get someone to pay for it.
Meanwhile, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, is already using wireless campuswide. Inside the Peter B. Lewis Building, the school is deploying Cisco Aironet dual radio, with both IEEE 802.11a and 802.11b APs (access points).
I spoke with Lev Gonick, vice president of IT services at the school, who told me the goal is to create “a cloud of connectivity” for students, faculty, administration, and operations staff.
Because Case Western has one of the initial deployments of IEEE 802.11a, I asked Gonick to give me some of the pros and cons of 802.11a.
He confirmed that throughput is more substantial with 802.11a and that in a streaming-media environment using full-screen video, they were able to get up to six people on an AP. However, you do need more APs due to the shorter range of 802.11a vs. 802.11b. The ratio is 3-to-1 in number of APs.
But what is really interesting is how the WLAN will be put to use. Students will be able to play back lectures over IP video or watch a lecture in real time from the cafeteria. When fully deployed, the system will use 1,500 APs campuswide and cost slightly less than $100,000.
The convergence of remote classes over the Internet and the ability to attend live classes remotely using WLANs is going to cause a revolutionary change in higher education.
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