The University of Tennessee at Knoxville was an early adopter of massive WLAN deployment. From January 2000 to July 2001, 1200 access points were installed across 15 million square feet, making this the largest 802.11b deployment in academia ... in the shortest time.

All academic and administrative buildings are covered. The installation involved local contractors for handwork, and University expertise for network and wireless engineering. The design included 100% usage of power-over-ethernet, with the vendor selection carefully studied in order to support upcoming standards such as 802.11A and 802.11G.

The original plan included RADIUS authentication and encryption, but lack of compatibility (support of Linux and PDA mostly) made us change the firmware on all 1200 devices ... completely scripted with SNMP! We now run a semi-open WLAN, with DHCP registration authenticated on LDAP and silent monitoring of MAC addresses in the background. Many new challenges have been encountered, and will be described further at NANOG.