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Oxy Among Top 50 "Unwired" Campuses
Occidental College is one of the country’s Top 50 “Most Unwired College Campuses,” according to Intel’s second annual ranking of wireless Internet accessibility on college and university campuses.
One of the country’s first small colleges to install a wireless network, Occidental is one of the few nationally ranked liberal arts colleges on the Intel list. Ranked No. 37, it also is one of just five west coast institutions to make the list.
Occidental installed its first wireless network in its central campus in 2000. Today, more than 75 access points in the Cisco/Apple system serve all academic buildings and student residence halls, the library, the student center, the main Quad and various other buildings. About 75 percent of the college’s 1,840 students take advantage of its wireless capability through their laptop computers.
On average, 98 percent of Intel’s top 50 campuses are covered by a wireless network, up from 64 percent last year, with three-quarters having 100 percent wireless network coverage, up from just 14 percent last year, according to the survey.
Intel’s rankings are based on the percentage of each college campus covered by wireless technology, the number of undergraduate students and the computer-to-student ratio for each school. The study examined schools with more than 1,000 students. Data was gathered through interviews, review of public documents and additional industry sources; the "America's Most Connected Campuses" ranking conducted by Princeton Review and published in Forbes; and an online survey.