Northern Michigan University teams with Motorola for campus-wide WiMAX

Northern Michigan University was fairly early to the game in offering laptops and campus-wide WiFi to its students, and it looks like it's now stepping things up even further with a little help from Motorola, which is providing the backend for NMU's new campus-wide WiMAX network (a first in the US). Better still, the university is also providing some brand new WiMAX-equipped ThinkPads to nearly 3,000 of the school's more than 9,000 students, and it's also making a range of laptop and desktop WiMAX adapters available to students with non WiMAX-enabled computers. With a radius of some 30 miles, the network will also encompass a number of off-campus sites, and be made available to local schools and municipal offices though a licensing arrangement.

[Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons]

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 22nd 2009 5:04PM]

windows 7 should work fine. I have no idea about vista...
hopefully they update the driver soon. I found a bug with the wifi handoffs. some leading to a complete os failure.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 22nd 2009 1:36PM]

Good ol' UP. If it's not winter, you're at most two months away.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 22nd 2009 1:55PM]

It was great to see this article and the comments here. Yoopers, trolls, pasties, bad weater. The only thing not mentioned so far are saunas (SOW-na)s.
Love Engadget!

[Apocalyptic 0n3 Posted Aug 22nd 2009 2:25PM]

That was effing creepy. I scroll down the homepage and see my college there. Was not expecting that.

[Benson Posted Aug 22nd 2009 3:59PM]

In other news, the street price for a used N810W goes through the roof...

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 22nd 2009 5:07PM]

they have already gone through the roof :(
I was looking to pick one up, but they just cost too much.
hopefully I will be able to get my netbook certs working and connected.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 22nd 2009 4:05PM]

Yes, I am a freshman at NMU, just got here 2 days ago. Yes, NMU is not know for their scholarly students, but it is a sweet place to live. This new WiMax will be great for those dead spots outside, and it might offer some opportunities to download torrents unnoticed for a while.

[raptor87 Posted Aug 22nd 2009 4:11PM]

torrents work fine on any of the connections, everything still passes through the audible magic server so be careful what you download.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 22nd 2009 5:09PM]

Actually the wimax network would be the works school network to use. everything is monitored. They don't have it implemented yet, but they are planning on blocking p2p traffic on the wimax.
If you want to use torrents.. get charter, or get some type of encryption. (they only 'warn' you twice)

[spin cycle Posted Aug 22nd 2009 4:36PM]

I didn't know that so there were so many Northern students! Seriously!

And what's with the "NMU" stuff, do students at Northern call it NMU now? I never heard anyone in-state call it that before.

It's also funny to hear people from Marquette calling Houghton or Sault Ste. Marie burghs. They're all burghs! That's really part of the charm! Go get outdoors while it's still great and then get primed for CCHA/WCHA hockey and the long haul of winter.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 22nd 2009 8:19PM]

managers are people who can't do the work.

[jpiffer Posted Aug 22nd 2009 8:20PM]

Anyon have an idea if they will begin to offer to public?

[SomePerson Posted Aug 22nd 2009 9:41PM]

So when are we going to see more WiMax?

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 23rd 2009 12:18AM]

I've been told that currently Sprint and Clearwire own 95% of the licenses for the 2.5GHz spectrum across the US. The other 5% is reserved for education. That is one of the only frequencies that can be used to support mobile applications such as a usb or pcmcia adapter. The other frequencies that WiMax uses have power limitations set by the FCC. So look towards sprint or clearwire for your mobile WiMax solutions.

[ejmiller Posted Aug 23rd 2009 1:17AM]

I was surprised at first to see a story about my old school. Then not so surprised after I thought about it. Over the years I've heard about how they've improved the computer science curriculum and were early adopters of a student laptop program. Makes me proud to have my B.S. in Computer Science from Northern. Yes, it's a bit isolated and I've got winter storm stories to tell my kids. But the U.P. is beautiful and the summers are great. Being married definitely helped with the isolation. :-)