Services

wireless

WHERE IT IS

Wireless LAN, or WLAN, is available to the Baylor community anywhere on the main Baylor campus. Wireless is also available in all of the Baylor offices in the Baylor Clinic, the Faculty Center and at the John P. McGovern (Nabisco) campus. This map shows the location of wireless access areas.

Wireless network capability in the College’s educational space includes all large auditoria, small lecture rooms, third and fourth floor classrooms, and in the ERC. Kill switches have been installed within the McMillian and Kleberg Auditoria. This means the faculty can request that the Audio Visual staff turn off the wireless network access in those rooms if they believe it is interfering with their teaching.

HOW TO ACCESS IT

In order to access Baylor’s wireless network you will need a BCM ECA account (the same User ID and password you use for your BCM email). Check out the IT site for more information about wireless connectivity at Baylor. Click here more information about how to access the BCM WLAN.

Since the inception of wireless networking at BCM, Cisco’s proprietary Light-weight Extensible Authentication Protocol (LEAP) has been the means of authenticating to Baylor’s wireless LAN (WLAN). It was chosen for a variety of Baylor-specific reasons and has proven to be a secure and reliable means of authentication.

Though LEAP continues to be widely deployed in enterprise networks around the world, the IT program has been working toward a more secure form of authentication since early 2006. Accordingly, IT recently added a new form of authentication to the wireless network. This means that in addition to LEAP, PEAP (Protected Extensible Authentication Protocol) is also now available across Baylor’s WLAN. PEAP is an open standard jointly developed by Cisco, Microsoft, and RSA Security.

The IT Program selected PEAP for several important reasons. First, it is supported natively in Vista. Second, it is also supported in Linux and Macintosh (OSX 10.3 and newer). Third, PEAP does not require client-side digital certificates which would be costly and extremely challenging to deploy and manage in Baylor’s environment. Finally, PEAP is a more secure form of authentication than LEAP.

Though PEAP has been widely adopted across the College and is the wireless authentication protocol being implemented by the IT Program on all new wireless devices, LEAP is still quite common across the enterprise and continues to be supported. For all of the previously cited reasons, the IT Program plans to completely discontinue support for LEAP authentication no later than December 31, 2007.

WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH IT

At the present time BCM can provide Web, e-mail, and BECON (including its Blackboard electronic course support) access to laptop wireless clients. As time progresses more online resources will be provided. All entering students were supplied with the specifications for the purchase of laptops or PCMCIA cards that would permit them to access the network.