The Study of Students Perceptions of On-campus ... - Research Bank

truly mobile computing solution” (Nisbet, 2004). By studying those two
cases, Nisbet concluded “the decision to install a wireless network in a
campus environment is a major strategic initiative for an organisation”
(Nisbet, 2004).
Nisbet (2004) had mainly studied two cases. The two cases were both in
private schools and the students were teenagers. All form 7 students from
the first school and all students from the second school were required to
purchase Toshiba laptops and carry them to school. From the educators’
perspective, the same brand of laptops was easier to support and manage,
but from the students’ perspective, they were restricted and lost their
choice. Although the second school allows students to chose another brand,
the students will lose the hardware and software support from the school.
Brawn, Koan & Caye (2004) outlined the authentication process of wireless
network services on campus at Arizona State University West (ASU West).
The authentication process incorporated security for both wired and
wireless networks. The 802.1x security protocol was used for this
authentication process. Compared to the Microsoft PPTP VPN, which was
the previous encryption protocol, the 802.1x was faster and scalable. There
were more advantages in using the 802.1x to replace the Microsoft PPTP
VPN. For example, the 802.1x required at least a minimum encryption
which made the traffic in the wireless network safer. The authors defined
the IEEE 802.1x authentication as a standard Extensible Authentication
Protocol (EAP) for 802.11 wireless local area networks. The article stated
that the client, access point and the authentication server were the main
components of the 802.1x authentication. Then each of the main
components were explained and presented in the article. The 802.1x
authentication consisted of five steps and it started from sending packets
from the client side to an access point, then passed on to the authentication
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