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Case Files: applied Wireless - Big Network Off Campus

By Michael Kanell

March 15, 2003 — CIO — An ambitious cloud has settled over Athens, Ga. The invisible presence is actually a hopeful experiment, a wireless local area network that was formally flicked into being in December around 24 blocks of downtown in this small city. It is now heavy with connections, communications and?mostly?possibilities.

Known as the Wireless Athens Group Zone?WAGZone for short?the cloud was the brainchild of technologists at the University of Georgia’s New Media Institute. From its conception, the project took about 18 months to build. "Pretty much all New Media programs start off with five words: Wouldn’t it be cool if," says Scott Shamp, the institute’s director and an associate professor at the university’s communications school. "We wanted students to think about using mobile technology to forge a new relationship with information."

With nine Wi-Fi transmission boxes spread around downtown, the WAGZone welcomes laptops and PDAs fitted with wireless networking cards. Users get access to WAGZone content, and if they are University of Georgia (UGA) students or faculty, they also have access to the Internet. If the WAGZone takes flight, it will get its lift from the school’s roughly 31,000 students. And at the outset, the applications most likely to draw immediate use are aimed right at students?at least the ones who walk downtown with a wireless PDA. (Shamp estimates that 35 percent of students own a laptop, but has no firm estimates on how many are wireless or how many students have PDAs.)

The first application that New Media students talk about is called Nimbus. It lets a user set up a list of likewise-equipped friends, then anytime a user is downtown, she can find out which of her "buddies" are also in the area?and where they are hanging out. Each user has to enter her location, so it is not automatic. (A global positioning option may be offered, should the WAGZone take off.) But it plays to student attitudes.

"If everybody’s going to a concert, say, then the database will show that, and you’ll know that’s the hottest show," says Ryan Manchee, a telecommunications major at UGA. "Or you see that some people are hanging out at Wuxtry’s" (which sells used records and CDs), "or that your friend Heidi is studying at Espresso Royale. The typical college students, they come downtown, and if they’ve got 20 friends, why call them all to know where they are?"

Of course, it’s hard to envision student shmoozing as the core of a profitable business plan. So the WAGZone is envisioned also as a tool for connecting merchants and visitors?tourists, townies and students too. Over at Wuxtry Records on East Clayton Street, co-owner Dan Wall likes the idea that the network tells people where their friends are, where the cool places are, and what new releases are in the stores or?in his case?what dusty but desirable rarities of days gone by exist.

 

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