The Wireless Andrew initiative and Carnegie Mellon University's researchers laid the foundation for today's wireless local area networks
Just two years after the first wireless area network protocol — called IEEE 802.11 — was first adopted in 1997, Carnegie Mellon University became the first university to offer campus-wide, high-speed wireless internet access.
Alex Hills vividly remembers how CMU students went wireless long before their counterparts at other universities.
"CMU's Wireless Andrew was the precursor to what we now know as Wi-Fi," said Hills, a distinguished service professor of engineering and public policy and the first director of CMU's Information Networking Institute (INI).
The INI received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for wireless research in the early 1990s, and as principal investigator, Hills launched the Wireless Andrew initiative, with the help of then-INI director Ben Bennington and Computing Services' Charles Bartel, who received his master's degree from the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy in 1995.
In its earliest days, CMU's first wireless network covered a portion of Wean Hall — for wireless researchers only. It was password protected so as not to disrupt the research.
"CMU students are smart and pretty soon they hacked their way on to the network. It didn't take long before we had more students than researchers using it. That was my first hint of the demand for an anytime, anywhere internet," Hills said.
