Infrastructure
Wi-Fi in classrooms upgraded to keep pace with student demand
Most UD students now bring at least two wireless devices to campus. Being able to support this increase in wireless demand has been a top priority for UD IT. The University now has about 2,700 wireless access points (APs) in buildings across the Newark campus.
Over the past several months, IT staff completed an evaluation of the wireless service in all 182 centrally scheduled classrooms on the Newark campus. All UD classroom APs now have been upgraded to the newest generation of wireless protocol (802.11ac), including 119 APs installed this summer. The new APs provide more capacity, each able to support almost twice the number of devices than older APs while providing 33-50% more bandwidth to those devices. The new APs also extend wireless signals further and with greater strength than the previous generation of APs.
Every classroom now has at least one AP, and classrooms with more than 60 seats have at least two. APs were relocated in several classrooms for better coverage, and many of the large lecture halls (e.g., 120/130/140 Smith, 130/131 Sharp) each have four APs to service the expanded needs and increased number of devices today's students bring to class. Before the spring 2016 semester, IT plans to add additional APs to eight classrooms that present network design or construction challenges (e.g., 100 Wolf).
Windows 10 licenses added to UD’s Microsoft agreement
This summer, the University added Windows 10 to its Microsoft license agreements.
- Windows 10 is available from the University’s UDeploy server. Costs are as follows:
- Windows 10 for Education: free for UD students
- Windows 10 Enterprise: free for UD-owned computers
- Windows 10 for Education: $9.75 under a Microsoft work-at-home license for UD faculty and employees.
- Windows 7 and 8 are still available at no charge for University-owned computers, and are available for faculty- and employee-owned computers under a Microsoft work-at-home license. (UDeploy)
- Office 365 for Education remains free for student-, faculty-, and employee-owned computers and devices (Instructions for downloading from Microsoft Office 365 Portal). This version is not for use on University-owned computers or devices.
- Office Professional Plus (Windows) and Office for Mac are available at no charge for University-owned computers. (UDeploy)
Note: Windows 10 for Education and any software acquired under a Microsoft work-at-home license are provided by Kivuto, an academic reseller.
