RANDY METCALF/Arizona Daily Wildcat In years to come, more UA students will use wireless network cards like these instead of cables to connect to the Internet both on the UA Mall and in class. Cell phones, laptops and Palm Pilots are being used increasingly throughout campus, and the UA network may eventually be equipped to support wireless Internet through these devices.

UA looks toward the next technological student trend

A sophomore out on the Mall pauses to answer her cell phone during lunch.

"Biochemistry 181R, section 3, one seat available" it reads. She sits down on the grass, pulls out her laptop to register and gets into the class - without ever needing an Internet port.

Administrators and technology consultants across campus say this scene may become reality in just a few years, when students won't need cables to get to the Internet in some of the more popular areas on campus.

Officials are referring to wireless, the next technological wave they expect to spread through the University of Arizona. Everything from laptops to cell phones and Palm Pilots now works wireless - or without being connected to a port in a wall.

The UA community is taking note.

The movement started quietly in pockets and departments all around campus. About a year ago, alien-like gray, white and black cases with black antennas popped up on the walls of the James E. Rogers College of Law.

The classrooms needed Internet access, but cutting through slabs of cement to wire outside classrooms to the main building wasn't cost-effective, said Mohyeddin Abdulaziz, director of information technology for the building.

Enter wireless Internet.

The alien-looking devices on the walls are called access ports. Each port can provide access for about 15-25 students or more, depending upon whom you ask, for $6,000. Between five and 10 classrooms in the northern wing of the law college have been outfitted with a port, each of which can serve a lecture hall of 90 or more, depending upon how many people are online at once.

Sometimes the wireless system slows, said first-year law student Cara Weber, but it has crashed just one time this year.

Weber had to register her computer with the college before logging into the server and had to buy a $100 card that acts like a receiver inside her computer.

Only computers that have cards can get into the university's wireless Internet system, said Dan Roman, associate director for the Center for Computing and Information Technology.

But the signal can also be hacked and intercepted.

RANDY METCALF/Arizona Daily Wildcat First-year law student Matt Poirier uses his laptop before class yesterday morning. The buildings that encompass the James E. Rogers College of Law have acquired modem connections to allow students to use wireless technology from all part of the complex.

Tapping the technology

The wireless Internet system isn't perfect and isn't likely to replace the 25,000 computers and 34,000 data ports around campus students use now. The bandwidth is small, which limits the sizes of files that can be transferred, but the technology is still developing, Roman said.

"We encourage students, if they're on wireless, not to check their student link for instance, because there are security issues there," said Chris Johnson, director of the media center at the Integrated Learning Center.

But other universities, like the University of Tennessee, Penn State and Carnegie Mellon, use wireless networks extensively. Some colleges with smaller campuses have wireless coverage broad enough that a student can access the Internet with a laptop from almost anywhere on campus. Arizona State University also has a burgeoning wireless scene, said Jeremy Rowe, head of media development at ASU.

Getting campuswide wireless Internet would be a little more of a challenge, financially, at UA. The wider the area and the more users - the higher the cost. Very rough estimates set the price tag for wireless access on the Mall and nearby at $200,000 to $300,000, or more, Roman said.

UA spent more than $1 billion on information technologies like telephone service, Internet access and video conferencing in 2000-2001.

Already, wireless access to the UA network is being beamed via antenna to the Agriculture Farms, 4181 N. Campbell Ave., cancer center sites across Tucson and the Kappa Alpha Theta house, Roman said.

Access to wireless Internet is growing, because cell phones and computers are already the norm among the UA crowd, said Chris Impey, a distinguished professor of astronomy.

More than 90 percent of the freshmen Impey polled in his classes within the last year said they have cell phones. Though he doesn't know how many students have laptops, he said more than 70 percent of freshmen bring some kind of computer to college.

Over time, current cell phones will be replaced with models that have displays for Internet, like the models 15 percent of Impey's students have.

Power in your palm

As technology progresses, people will be able to get some of the same information on a cell phone or Palm Pilot that they can now get on a computer hard-wired to the Internet, said Sally Jackson, interim vice provost for academic affairs.

Across the nation, some Web pages are already being reformatted to fit on a smaller, Palm-Pilot-like screen, so that people can access the Internet without sitting in front of a computer.

Impey experimented with Internet-capable cell phones last year, loaning them out to students in one of his classes for an experiment. Impey sent online messages to the phones, notifying students when their grades were ready, assignments were due or they had extra-credit opportunities. The phones had a Web display option, where students could scroll through constellations or read classified ads from the newspaper.

Impey also set up a test system with Student Link that was never activated. Students could register and pay for classes by phone as usual but could also be notified when a seat opened up in a class for which they wanted to register.

Now Impey is working with voice-recognition software. In a few weeks, students will be able to call a phone number ask a question and their question will be parsed into recognizable parts and answered not by a human, but built by a voice-recognition system by Impey and his staff of students.

Whether wireless access and use of wireless grows at the UA will depend on how it fares at the ILC, Jackson said.

It will take a bigger budget and more state funding for something like wireless to take off, and other projects like the yet-to-be-opened Media Center have priority when funding for the ILC returns.