Students can run their computers the length of a football field and still stay connected to the World Wide Web at one of the first MBA schools in the country to go wireless. The Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Davis, is among the first of the country's MBA schools to offer its students a wireless local area network with unfettered, high-speed access to the Internet. Students with laptop computers, personal digital assistants or other wireless devices equipped with compatible networking cards can send and receive e-mail and use the World Wide Web at speeds comparable to the campus's wired network. "I really think this is a first among business schools," says Milton Blood, director of accreditation for AACSB - The International Association for Management Education. "It's an important step." Six base stations located throughout the school's building use radio frequencies to deliver bandwidth speeds of up to 11 million bits per second. Typical home cable modems and digital subscriber lines operate at speeds from 384,000 bits per second to 1.5 million bits per second. "This technology has been around a few years," says Bradford Luten, director of computing services for the school. "But it is exciting now because it is as fast as our wired connection." It's also much less expensive. The school received a $13,000 grant from the university to cover the costs of the wireless network, which can technically support up to 1,000 users per base station. Adding only 130 wired ports, the minimum to accommodate all the school's MBA students, would have cost more than $85,000. Luten says the system has a range of up to 300 feet -- the length of a football field -- and allows users to roam outdoors. "It's great not being connected to anything and having tremendous freedom," says Peter Blando, a second-year student in the full-time MBA program. Don Blodger, the school's assistant dean of admissions and student services, says the new system offers an advantage for recruitment too. "This provides an opportunity to move quickly into the high-tech arena. "It will be an added bonus in attracting MBA students worldwide since there are very few, if any, MBA schools with a wireless network," he says.