We were lucky in having the capital wireless deployment for all education and research space covered as part of a campus wide network upgrade.
The approach that we are using to sustain the wireless network funding is:
1. Try to minimize the cost of operations ("zero cost goal") by
standardizing and automatic tasks.
2. Fund the network centrally (for education and research).
3. Mandate that all new buildings under construction include wireless
deployment as part of the initial building budget (like they include
lights, power outlets etc).
4. Charge a per port (or per person) fee for each ethernet port and use
part of this to fund wireless operations.The non-academic & research space at UBC covered by a mix of funding model: the tenants can pay more per month/user if they don't contribute to the initial investment or can pay for the infrastructure and get wireless operations "at cost".
"At cost" includes operational and capital replacement (3 years AP and wireless items, 5 years for the more stable switches and core).
In any case, wireless is "free" to UBC Faculty, Staff and Students.
We will be coming out with a cost per user after a full school year of campus-wide operation and using this fee to charge non-UBC entities using the network. Commercial operations on campus might be paying a higher fee which is still very competitive.
We are up over 4700 unique users per month, so we'll be able to reach some fairly impressive economies of scale. My prediction is that we'll have over 7000 unique users after Christmas. We also don't have to worry about the whole accounting side in terms of cost recovery per user since any revenues are collected by the building contacts for non-UBC tenants (these includes the student residences and affiliate colleges).
We also have a hotspot model cooking for non-UBC visitors but I'm a little reluctant to start collecting money over the network. The number of external users is actually very low when you exclude "visitors" that can be sponsored for free by Faculty or Staff.
The problem you might face if you get departments to pay for equipment is they might not see the benefit of paying for the enterprise type of equipment when, for their purpose, cheap soho equipment might do the job. The only problem with this is when you calculate the TCO on a campus wide network.
Hope that helps.
... Jonn Martell, Wireless Manager, wireless.ubc.ca
Scott Genung wrote:
All,
I'm assuming that many of you are in my shoes when it comes to determining what type of funding model is needed to support the deployment of wireless coverage areas throughout your campus. We are looking at a cost recovery approach based upon the deployment of a coverage area that have been requested for non-public spaces. We are picking up the costs of deploying wireless in public spaces ourselves.
So, how many of you are looking at internal fund sources to pay for the deployment of your wireless coverage areas? What are they? Who is looking at external fund sources such as grants? What opportunities are available?
Thank you in advance for your responses.
Scott Genung Manager of Networking Systems Telecommunications and Network Support Services 124 Julian Hall Illinois State University
(309)438-8731 http://www.tnss.ilstu.edu
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