Our experience matches that of a lot of other schools. Initially, for budget reasons, a few buildings got APs in the hallways, but that's a suboptimal RF design and will not work properly, and we quickly moved away from that and instead tackled the hassles of trying to get APs into rooms and suites. This also made for natural small cells, which are pretty important. Things like NetFlix and Hulu are popular uses of the network, and when streamed over wireless, you have to start limiting users per AP.
The additional benefit of putting the APs in non-public areas to us as well was accountability, so that if damage were to occur, housing could bill the residents. Luckily, we also have not seen notable loss or damage. We use Cisco APs and small locks to affix them to their brackets, but no protective coverings beyond that. The Cisco brackets also make the cables inaccessible, so we haven't dealt with students unplugging anything*. We and our residence staff were concerned about vandalism initially, but everyone has been pleasantly surprised. In some of our new buildings each suite has a small mechanical closet for water heaters etc. and that turned out to be a good place for the AP, as it's reachable from the hallway and not reachable by the residents, but still basically in the suite. If there's new construction or renovation, doesn't hurt to have a chat with the architect or engineer to see if they have any ideas. The biggest complaint we have received regarding the access points in rooms was that the blinking light bothered residents, so in the residence halls we've turned off the LED indicators. Also, 5 GHz is a must. There's no way to get 2.4 GHz to work reliably, the lack of channels for tiling and microwaves, game controllers and other endless amounts of 2.4 GHz devices see to that, and we strongly encourage students to get dual-band cards or systems. In buildings where we have blanket wireless coverage, the use of wired connections by residents has almost completely vanished even when there's a hot and ready jack right in their room, so there's an obvious strong preference of wireless among the student population. This can maybe be translated into a cost savings to justify the Wifi install. -- Toivo Voll Network Engineer Information Technology Communications University of South Florida *In some of our older classrooms where we rigged wireless using existing jacks that were accessible, we repeatedly had to go and plug them back in because people would ignore any amount of "don't unplug / don't touch" signage or common sense. Based on that experience, if your jacks / AP jacks are accessible, I'd certainly recommend some kind of enclosure that keeps enterprising self-help fingers off them. > -----Original Message----- > From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv > [mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU] On Behalf Of David > Robertson > Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2012 8:37 AM > To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU > Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] Wireless in Residence Halls > > We are looking at how we install wireless in our Residence Halls for > coverage. Currently we only place access points in the hallways, but > are looking at moving them into the rooms for better coverage. We were > wondering if anyone else has put the access points in the rooms and if > they have seen a reduction in wireless complaint or if there have been > issues with students playing with or disconnecting the access points. > > David R. > > -- > David Robertson > Service Delivery Manager > Network Engineering Technology > George Mason University > Voice: 703-993-2443 > Fax: 703-993-3505 > > ********** > Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent > Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.