UALR Gets Free Radio Frequency Software

UALR’s Department of Systems Engineering will receive license-free radio frequency (RF) planning and optimization software and training from CelPlan Technologies under an academic agreement currently offered to no other university in the U.S. and one other worldwide.

The university will receive 20 free licenses of CelPlan’s CelPlanner suite of RF planning and optimization software, according to a UALR press release. The software is used to design, deploy, and test the performance of wireless systems, including indoor wi-fi systems and 4G LTE (long-term evolution) systems as well as previous technologies.

The software will be in use in the university’s computer labs through the end of this school year and can also be used in UALR’s academic curriculum. The company will provide an onsite instructor at a discounted rate. According to Dr. Hussain Al-Rizzo, UALR professor and director of the Antennas and Wireless Systems Research Laboratory, the software is expensive for academic institutions.

Al-Rizzo said the software and research will help students find a job and will help instructors cover topics they otherwise couldn’t cover.

Al-Rizzo said students could be assigned design problems in Arkansas as part of their coursework if the company allows the university to do so.
The availability of the software could be a draw for telecommunications businesses considering a Little Rock site.

“Companies interested in telecommunication, they will love to see an institution in which students are trained on these software tools because otherwise it’s extremely expensive to train their employees on this software,” he said.

The department is part of the UALR George W. Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology, which recently was ranked 41st on U.S. News & World Report’s list of the top undergraduate engineering programs for 2015.

CelPlan is also offering free software to the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus in Trinidad.