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Wireless boxes are provided free of charge to residents of rooms in wireless-only houses. Each wireless box has a sticker on it identifying the room to which it belongs. Theft of wireless boxes has been a problem in the past, resulting in the occasional shortage of wireless boxes. If a room requires a new wireless box, contact the ITS Helpdesk SCIC. It may take some time to acquire a replacement wireless box, though you should be updated if this is the case. Feel free to contact the ITS the ITS Helpdesk again for an update at any time.
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A physical, fiber-optic cable runs from the Carleton network to the basement of each house as normal. In the affected houses, however, there is no internal ethernet cabling so there are no wired ports on the walls. Time, budget and significant inconvenience (due to the necessary construction work) are all factors in this situation.
Instead of physical cabling, the fiber-optic cable connects to a wireless access point (AP) in the basement which pumps out a signal specific to that house. Each room in the house is then equipped with a wireless box - normally mounted to the wall or the side of a desk - which connects the room to the wireless AP in the basement.
_The campus network connects to a wireless AP in the basement of the house.
This AP sends out a wireless signal which connects the wireless boxes in each room._
These boxes have built in ethernet ports to which students connect their personal machines using a normal network cable, just like a normal wall port. In this way, the wireless box acts as a wireless bridge of sorts and the student does not need to have a wireless card of their own.
Wireless Box Basics
Below is a picture of one of these wireless boxes. Neither students nor SCIC workers should ever have to pull these apart even for troubleshooting - we leave that to the network admin - but it's worth knowing what should be in there.
The box contains some circuitry which is used to configure it to connect to a specific house's network ID (SSID). The wireless card is a PC(MCIA) card, much the same as you might buy for a laptop. Only certain models of PC card are compatible with these boxes, so these cards should never be removed and/or replaced by anyone other than the network admins.
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