2502 West Colorado Ave., Suite 203 · Colorado Springs, CO 80904 ·
Voice 719.636.2040 · Fax 719.528.5869 ·Wireless Web http://wireless.oldcolo.com








































Progress Report 1

November 20th, 1995

Lets see - where are we?

Things are moving slowly.

The most important delay is that Dewayne and Bob don't expect to be able to bring up the San Luis Valley schools wireless until spring. Not sure about the Mitchell High School.

That throws the less-flexible schedule we have for the structured teacher-educational/wireless network exercises out of kilter badly.

We have firm commitments, an announced schedule, 12-15 teachers, intructor (George), all pointed toward a 15 Jan course start date (a week after teachers have arrived back at their schools) and which must terminate after 48 hours of on-their-own online time intruction by mid May. And in preparation for that we have a second-week in January requirement for George to come in, the hardware software to be installed on one workstation in each of the four schools, give the teachers preliminary, on the spot training in using it on the network, and for George to get each of the 12 teachers 'started' on site, online.

Its too late in the game to call up all the schools and teachers and districts and coordinators and throw that schedule out and start all over, with a now-undetermined date of wireless connections. We promised the schools that the course requirement (and the minimum has to be 48 hours according to the UCCS for-credit work) would not be so demanding each week that they would have to drop out (they are all active teachers who will be also teaching 5 days a week, and will have to do their demanding online work on their own time)

So I am going ahead with that plan even though I will now have to do a major alteration in its technical support.

  1. I am ordering up the 8 phones that will have to be installed after the wireless routers are up, (6 in the Valley, 2 at MItchell High School) to be operational in mid December. One at each school, with the drop coming into the location of their NT or other server (where I have to assume the router and wireless radio will be stationed, when installed) and 3 of the others at RMII in Alamosa, the other at the District 11 Site (this last is problematical)
  2. We will buy the 8 28.8 modems which have to be used on the wireless routers later.
  3. We will connect up in the Valley to 3 of Ken's open serial ports on his server and open a 24 hour a day SLIP/PPP account. And do something comparable in Colorado Springs. (I doubt if the system at Sch Dis 11 can support a SLIP connection. We shall see).
  4. I will set up the 3 Class C TCP/IP SLIP on the NT servers in the Valley and to the ONE workstation where the teachers will do their work from.
  5. Therefore, by the 1st week of January all the systems will be fully on the net at 28.8 phone line speed.
  6. The second week of January George will arrive and visit all four schools with me, and Steve Ingham who is getting the advanced peripherals for individual workstation work (graphics tablet, sound and video board, video camera, hand scanner, and software. Including Netscape 2.0 as the workstation primary user interface for the course).
  7. We will, during that visit (a)install the user peripherals, (b) get them familiar with it (c) and George will get each of the 12 teachers started in the course proper. Using the phone line connection to the net.
  8. When the radios, routers are installed, school by school, we will drop the SLIP phone modem attachement, and substitute the wireless line/router attachment.

I have taken delivery on the wireless.org NT server with one workstation which will be up within 10 days in our office in Old Colo City, connected to the net - upon which will reside (1) the web, ftp, telnet-accessible Project Journal and Final Report - for world-wide public access and (2) the home-system into which all the teachers will log in and all the text, dialogue, graphical data, web pages will reside, and where Dr. Johnston will hold forth. (3) a place where all us project people can also log into for whatever needed reasons - such as forwarding results from tests.

This is the system which will meet the NSF reqirement that we put up a running account, and fully accessible final report w/graphics of the Wireless Field Tests. It may last long after the NSF project is over. And could easily be the 'home' of expert information on wireless in general.

That system will be running Netscape Communications Server software, and Wildcat 5 NT full feature BBS-conferencing software, internet compliant. And some general mailer I haven't decided yet. (damned NT's require too much add ons. OS2 Warp Connect has it all. But since 3 of the 4 schools have NT lans, I figured we can learn what we have to learn about NTs from it, and make it also a model for school/community access networking - which several of those schools want already.

So I am going to be busy as hell this next month, Xmas notwithstanding, so we can keep to a schedule that bears some relationship to the school years. It will do us no good, as far as practical field testing is concerned, to be running the systems in the summer when school is out, and in the valley they are closed down entirely.

I would appreciate it if Dewayne and Bob would inform the rest of us what their visit schedule is now, and what they think they can accomplish on their next visit.

Dave Hughes

Next