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High Speed Net Access Defining College Life
peter303 writes "Todays LA Times has an article on how high speed InterNet access (defined as 10 Mbit ethernet
in your dormroom or 100+ times T-1/ISDN/fast modem)
is revolutionizing college life: such things as routine streaming
video and free long distance phone calls. It is creating a generation
of "speed-junkies" that is affecting college admissions,
employment and housing decisions, and propelling consumer demand for high bandwidth pipes. " Bandwidth convinced me to move on campus. The lack of bandwidth nearly kept me there (despite paying like 4x as much as I did simply renting a house nearby). Its very true.
I love t3 in my room
Just think about what will happen when broadband access is as widespread in the "real world" as it is in corporate/educational America. Free, high-quality phone calls and videoconferencing. Lightning-fast transfer speeds. Industries such as the long-distance telecom industry are already changing to meet this demand. Notice how phone rates are trending towards a flat rate per month plus nominal charges for calls.
Of course, free stuff isn't always "free" -- there are ads, and antiprivacy crap like monitoring your web usage. I wouldn't be surprised to see legislation about that in the next three years.
For more information, click here.
this is true.. i was gonna move into our rat infested dorms for the t1... but i would prolly get expelled for having a warez server up/
ERROR: Keyboard not attached. Press F-1 to continue.
Ha, this is good because today in my school's newspaper there was a frontpage article on pirating that goes on in our Resident Halls Networks. They want to stop these pirates but they can't reach them all but one way of curbing them is to NOT improve the school network. "The students are not using the school network primarly for school work" I think was the main arguement on why the staff network was going to be upgraded before the Residents Halls networks.
"However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation."
had similar for 2+ years on campus and wouldn't get net access at my house (until work gave me a dialin) because I can't stand modems now.
DSL should come soon
It's the only thing I miss about living off-campus. Our dial-up access here is sluggish, even for a modem.
I'd settle for cable-modems, but, the local cable co. (Time Warner) hasn't gotten around to that yet. I wish they'd realize the demand, given the number of off-campus students who miss being able to view pages in under 2 minutes.
Oh, well...I'm stuck in the backwoods, maybe that's why...
At UCF all apartment complexes around campus here have ethernet. ethernet and digital cable. doesnt get any better.
studies are beginning to point towards a relationship between time spent on the 'net and a loss of mental or physical well being ... from experience, I can attest that high speed access in a college environment is like a drug -- you've got your gamers, your chatters, your pr0nners, etc. etc. etc. and the newfound freedom of college seems to encourage abuse of this access ... is society as a whole headed for trouble, or, worst case scenario, a disaster, when the day comes that people prefer electronic contact over personal/physical ... ?
I am, therefore you think.
It is true I live in San Jose and go to SJSU. Many of my friends have failed classes because of all night crusades to play StarCraft over the high speed access.
Routine things like asking a friend to go to dinner is now done on AIM. Discussing things for the weekend is now done on AIM with 5 friends at once, even though they live next door.
At one point I used to msg my roommate questions because the music would be to loud I would first have to ask him to turn down the music then ask him the question.
We never bought a tv, we just watched realplayer videos of South Park on our computers, that we d/l right before.
Once your submerged in high speed access you never want to go back. The small things in life become fun and you become extremly efficient.
At my university (Imperial College) I am currently in the only halls or residence with network access although more are being done this academic year (by erricson). We use it all the time to email/icq each other when phones would be inappropriate (after midnight) and some use netmeeting to converse with foreign relatives. Students are the future. Give them access to technology today.
Here at Purdue University we have a resnet connection for a one time, cheap price (I think) $160 for two semesters seems fair. It is extremely fast, and yes, over christmas break I went through withdrawl!
At the University of Missouri - Rolla, they ran fiber optics to all the dorms about 4-5 years ago. Retention of people who lived on campus skyrocketed. They ran 10bT to every room. People started setting up floor based and building based domains. It turned out to be VERY cool.
"Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not taking life seriously enough." - Larry Wall
I spent 4 years at Univesity and didn't even have a PC until the last couple of months, in spite of doing a CS degree. I remember long evenings spent on campus in front of an INDY exercising the SuperJANET link heading South.
Back in early '93 I looked at going to St. Andrews (SE Scotland) and they'd just built a new hall right next to the CS building. Apparently 10-BaseT was going into all the rooms. It seemed kind of weird back then: "Can I grab my FidoNET echomail without running up a huge phone bill?"
And now we have AOL eating the world, and you can buy rubber dogshit online from the comfort of your armchair. It's great to be working in the spearhead of progress...
I really enjoyed living in the dorms (I met my wife there, how cool is that?) and I know that when I started college the dorms with ethernet were in higher demand than any others.
I think I also contributed to my dorms having the highest campus bandwidth utilitzation!
Mordred
revolutionizing college life: such things as routine streaming video and free long distance phone calls
...and most importantly, HIGH-SPEED PORN
I currently attend a school in Southern California where we can exhange files on our microsoft network at about 400k/s. Due to the high speeds and the numerous computers on the network everybody seems to be pirating something. Ive personally seen people who otherwise wouldnt have known where to get this illegal material with hard disks full of mp3s and movies. These kids would never have the time to pirate as much as they do in a normal appt. Damn...I love my ethernet.
Especially about the withdrawl when going home over break. Fortunately I've got a cable modem now to ease the pain :)
My Ethernet connection is really the only thing keeping me on campus. I run a relatively small server (actually, my IP is the number 3 user of bandwidth on campus, behind 2 official school servers) from my desktop machine, and it's a lot of fun. And if I need anything - an ISO of RH6.1, any program, etc., it's right there at my fingertips. I use the internet to check the weather before I go to class, to check for my assignments, to converse with all of my friends, and just to have fun.
Of course, I'm sure all of my time spent on my computer has a drastic effect on my GPA (which is quite low at the time). However, it's not like I'm just sitting around and getting drunk - I'm learning something most of the time. When I need Linux help, I check the #linux channel on my favorite IRC server. Even though my GPA might not reflect it, I've got a good bit of practical experience from my time spent on the internet. Too bad Linux knowledge doesn't help too much with engineering.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
except that the netwrok is totally satrated all the time because of everyone running four instant messengers, 5 pay-to-surf scams, and two instances of napster. Talk about bandwith hog.
"Dying tickles!" -- Ralph Wiggum
Anybody else have this yet? I do and it's quite slick. 768Kbs and I can run my voice phone over the same line. Also, it's only running me $50 a month...can't beat that! rhino
Because it feels like something I've done before, yeah I could fake it but I'd still want more...
To stay in the dorms for a simple internet connection is Sad. Living off campus is a much better experience in life than a stupid T1 connection. Come on people . . . The outside world is calling your name!
I go to a Canadian university (SFU to be exact) and there is a severe shortage of on-campus housing, and no high-speed dorm connections either. Most Canadian colleges/universities are public, and I believe fewer have ethernet connections to residences (Gotta save that government money for adequate computer labs I guess :/ ). They have it in the labs, but they have strict rules about what you can do in the labs (No games, and the lack of audio capabilities or zip drives strongly indicates they discourage large multimedia downloads). Just as well 'cause the labs can scarcely accommodate the demands for word processing as it is. You Statesiders don't know how lucky you are!
Meanwhile I had a summer job on campus, and I was literally getting up at 5 am so that I could get there by bus and have a free hour to play with that precious ethernet connection before my shift started. Mmm, speed.
I had ethernet in my dorm in undergrad and was addicted to it. Imaginem my happiness when i found out that here in Columbia law school, you can rent an appartment with ethernet access!!! Its pretty cool. Now if i could only find some time to study ....
Myself, and 2 roommates have been living off campus in a 3 bedroom townhouse for the past 2 years... We get our fast bandwidth VIA a DSL connection to our local ISP. I don't know what the big deal with living on campus, unless you are transfering a lot of data between computers on campus, I've found my DSL to give me speeds that are sometimes faster then the T-1 I used to enjoy in my dorm room. And when you split a 60 dollar a month DSL bill three ways, its really affordable. For about the same price as my on-campus houseing(except I have to cook and clean) I get to enjoy my own spacious room and a fast internet pipe.
I have DSL and it seems to slow sometimes. Now that AOL and Time/Warner are one and Time/Warner owns most of the cable around here, I Think you'll see more cable modems around soon. AOL pre-installed of course. (one month free cable modem service with AOL blah blah blah)
It's become such a part of my life that I can't imagine not having it, just like those poor geeks in the article. It's how I communicate with the outside world. Every time I'm around a computer, I automatically assume it has an instant and fast connection. At a friend's house recently I wanted to check what movies were playing. He suggested I buy a newspaper.
A what?
So I turned to his computer to check the listings online, and ...
What?
What do you mean you don't have internet access? It's a COMPUTER, isn't it?
My mind has been warped permanantly by having instant access from every computer I use on a regular basis. This is the future.
Was I rambling? I'm not awake yet.
Either way, internet access does and will continue to raise interesting implications in regards to how a university is rated. Maybe the demand and competitiveness for Ivy league schools will be superseded by a demand for Wired schools?
Regards.
- tokengeekgrrl
Up to now our annual costs for supplying campus with this kind of bandwidth was been a couple hundred thousand or so, which is low enough that it's a dept budget item and "under the radar" -- but we are projecting our costs will be in the millions/year in the nearish future -- and that number attracts attention from the big suits.
Will schools start to suffer a Soviet-like collapse when they no longer have the resources (or the will to use them) to keep up with other schools?
IIRC, we are already at an OC-48 (48 T3/DS3's) for data/video/phone and OC-192 can't be far -- madness!
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
but seriously, i can see a few benefits: first, as a researacher, i don't have to live with crappy bandwidth hogging up my download times for articles, experimental work etc. secondly, as astudent, you get to play with some neat technology and raid the Inet for information (like free Cisco books!) and pilfer all you want. thirdly, if you'd like, you can set up a nice server and have some fun.
yeah, a lot of the network around here is used to stream video (ie pr0n), mp3's or whatnot, but those are practical skills, setting up a high demand server (the pr0n archive) or indexing everything (like the Samba indexer for the WIndows network).
it's not all fun and games, just mostly.
jose nazario jose@biocserver.cwru.edu
Our dorm rooms had telephone lines made out of human hair. Dialing up to campus involved horrible line noise that would spew all over your text editor. It was more efficient just to walk up to campus (through the snow or rain or whatever), sit in the labs, and walk back.
/all/ of my connections were high speed because I didn't have to compete with eight million fucking yuppies trying to stream radio stations from the other coast.)
The year after I graduated, they installed fiber optics. I recently dated a girl who is about four years younger than me and had just moved out of the same dorms. She mentioned that $her_isp is really slow and crappy, and that she really misses having such a high-speed connection. Made me feel ancient.
(Of course,
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Remember that kid who distributed warez and mp3s through his college and got busted big time? Well, just because the students have the bandwidth doesn't mean they'll use it correctly (at my gracefully endowed high school, we have a ton, and it doesn't get used for the means of education (we have a streaming music server for christs sake!) It spoils the student, although I would kill to have this kind of hookup at my home.
Speaking of internet connections, does anyone have a reasonable idea why DSL service hasn't expanded and is there any way to light a torch under the ISP/Phone Company's ass (Bell Atlantic) to get them to move quicker?
Just curious... What college do you think has the highest-bandwidth connection to the Internet? What about access to other networks like Intenet II? Would these affect/have affected your choice of a college? How?
Daniel J. Peng
I live off campus, but have 768K up/down DSL phone service available. My parents think I'm crazy paying $90/mo for my phone bill. The Just Don't Understand.
No sig.
I goto a realtively large University (Bowling Green State in Ohio). This is my third year and this is the first year of any change in the bandwith available. Before December of this year the only available bandwith came from four T1's. We have about 20k students...
:)
They finally got a 10mbit fractional DS3 and it improved the bandwith significantly. I was about to get a dialup account w/the local ISP for 11.95/month and use 56k. It would have beat the 2k/s I was steadily recieving...
I just hope as the University expands, that they don't neglect the needs of us "speed junkies"
Heck of an opportunity for an apartment developer, isn't it?
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I think I saw that on TLC the other day.
Last year, I lived on my t-1.
Over the summer, I live on my t-3 at work.
I moved into a house this year, and totally need my connection back!
I will probably be moving back into the dorms in the fall, and getting a job as a Resident Network Consultant, just so I can get a 100 megabit connection.
Eh...
When I was in college in the mid '80s, I had to miss class the old fashioned way, by playing RPGs and board games and pumping quarters into video games in the student lounge! And all we had during my first two years was a single 1200 baud dialup for the whole CS department!
:-)
Spoiled little k1dd13z. Furrfu.
P.S.:
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I think I saw that on MSNBC the other night!
hehe "where do you go to school?" "STFU!"
Hell, my roommates and I EACH almost dropped out of school, and we had nothing more than 14.4s to the Internet. (Kids: 14.4 was a MODEM SPEED. That's 14400 bits per second.) We were MUDding 24/7 (literally - there were statistics kept on whose dialup university connection was online the most, and one of the computers on our LAN was always #1 out of the thousands in the list). If we'd had broadband, forget about graduating, we probably would have starved to death.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I too enjoyed the high speed connection while living on campus. Now that I'm off campus (and waiting on my DSL) I've realized how much I've grown to rely on it. Now instead of just hitting my favorite weather page, I have to sit through 20 minutes of local news, or worse, 20 attempts to dial my ISP. Checking email takes what now seems forever and, once again, I spend more time playing with my Slinky than actually reading the page I tried to load.
Now that students and business professionals are getting a taste of a "real" internet connection at school or work, why shouldn't we expect the same at home or on the road? I work for a company that provides DSL/Wireless service in apartment complexes and hotels. In the past year I've been amazed at how quickly the demand for high speed connections from these type places has increased. People want there access and they want it to be fast. I think this is a great thing, the dream of a wired world is starting to look like a realistic goal.
Now if only my local Bell would hurry up and get me connected!
-Calvin A. Hobbes
I just realized what the people like Jon Katz are going to call the "children of the 90's". I'll lead up to it.
The 90's teens/20-somethings used to be "Generation X", but that's old now so we need a new name.
The most significant occurrence in the late 90's was the explosion of the Internet.
The 80's were the "Me Generation".
We will be "The iGeneration".
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I'm not arguing with high-speed access ;) but I realize that this is a nightmare from the University's perspective... maybe that's why I got a cease-and-desist message in my Appleshare drop box threatening me with legal action if I didn't stop sharing content. Interesting to look at the situation from 'the other side.' Think Carnegie Mellon, MP3s...
I think that keeping your eyes on what is happening at colleges is the best way of keeping your eyes on trends that will soon be mainstream. One case of this was mp3s. The rampant use of them on college intranets was widespread 3 years ago. It seems just now this is being reported (Wired) .
Now we hear about other benefits of the big pipe. Those kids just keep moving the target further and further away for the private corps who are trying to satisfy the public - it is really great. If any large corporation really wanted to see what is going to be cool in a couple years (or months?!!?) they should employ (and listen to) a panel of college tech student. If they don't the students may just have to do it themselves.
Yeah.
us peons on 56k modems may be forced to think while the download takes time.. hence more meaningful comments...
I attend the University of Arkansas, where about half of the dorms have been wired. Not mine, however.
When I signed up for the dorm, I was under the impression that it was wired, so high-speed 'net access was a contributing factor there. Likewise, it was a major part of my decision between the two schools that I had narrowed my college choice down to.
Now I have a cable modem at home and dial-up at school. Despite the 'reversed' situation, the effects are largely the same...it irritates me so much when I have to download large files over dialup (kernel and xfree updates, anyone? :) that I often walk to a computer lab with a zip disk or two rather than wait an hour in my room. Works out pretty well, given that I can bring headphones and listen to the latest from mp3.com.
I attend the University of Arkansas, where about half of the dorms have been wired. Not mine, however.
When I signed up for the dorm, I was under the impression that it was wired, so high-speed 'net access was a contributing factor there. Likewise, it was a major part of my decision between the two schools that I had narrowed my college choice down to.
Now I have a cable modem at home and dial-up at school. Despite the 'reversed' situation, the effects are largely the same...it irritates me so much when I have to download large files over dialup (kernel and xfree updates, anyone? :) that I often walk to a computer lab with a zip disk or two rather than wait an hour in my room. Works out pretty well, given that I can bring headphones and listen to the latest from mp3.com.
I live in an off-campus apartment, but my parents are 45 min away, and they have a cable modem. Now, I'm tempted to live at home for free laundry, food, and cable modem for Summer.
ResNet was great for these reasons: 1. Being the only computer-literate person on my residence floor, the high speed internet connection increased my ability to wow my peers with nifty stuff. Nothing adds to your popularity among first-year students faster than a 2 gig collection of hip mp3s. 2. Anyone with an an ethernet card and a length of 10-base-T cable could steal Internet access and likely not get caught. 3. The honest among us only paid $100 a year. We didn't have any daily upload/download limits, I don't know if this is still true at that particular University. In my opinion, the schools that do have these are way too strict about it... limiting users to 15megs of uploading a day is a bit unreasonable in my opinion. I think that if the school finds it necessary to create these limits in order to deter students from running Warez servers etc., they should still be reasonable about it... since the vast majority of students who have these internet connections don't use them for anything more than checking their Hotmail account and looking at those "You're My Friend!" web sites. It would make more sense to not impose any limits and then IF someone is consistently uploading hundreds of megs a day, look into it.
"On the other hand, the early worm gets eaten."
I mean really, we have the eBusiness, eCommerce, etc.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
8^D
Seriously, I can't imagine how much MORE time would have been wasted with today's bandwidth! Bonghits, beer, acid, etc. was plenty to keep me occupied and away from my studies. If I had access to the endless streams of info, games and other distractions on the Internet today, I might not have graduated at all, let alone in four years.
[ insert your own witty .sig here ]
Of course having a T1 connection in my room does not make a big difference when it comes to slashdotting, but it makes a HUGE difference when it comes to watching BBC news 24h videostream.
By the way, I am in UK, and, because of JANET business, p0rn of any form is illegal. However, most of the l33t people have found a way around it. Warez is illegal too. But half the guys have put up leech FTPs, with ratios running from 1:3 to 1:1
My exam is on 17th, and here I am slashdotting. I blame the university for my (probable) bad grades.
Me Generation. I Generation. Get it?
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
This is old news, but in Ottawa, Canada, the telco (Bell) used to offer 2.2 mbps residential ADSL for $70 (cdn) per month. This included a static IP address. They stopped offering this to residential customers over a year ago, opting instead for a much more cost-effective and scalable 1.0 mbps ADSL at $40 per month. This one however uses a proprietary protocol, as well as forced proxies, and does not offer static IP addressing.
I know several people who still have the old fast ADSL and refuse to move to another house or apartment, because doing so would force them to give up their higher bandwidth ADSL. They just can't imagine themselves having to downgrade their bandwidth and live with the same kind of "almost fast speeds" that everyone has now!
Bell still offers the high speed ADSL to corporate customers starting at $500 per month, thus (IMHO) gouging the local companies and making it near impossible for home users to have decent connections.
-Crackos
This is actually quite true. I will have to agree with everyone else.
I currently live in an area where the fastest internet access available is mediocre 56k with Cable coming possibly in 2001 and ADSL, who even knows? Bell Atlantic sais its "Available in [my] general area" but its not "Available in [MY] fone line", well, GREAT, THANKS.
Every time I get on a fast line (and by this I mean 20KByte/sec transfers plus) I feel like I am in heaven! Whether or not Cable/ADSL access is available in the region I move to next (after High School, etc) will be a big part of my decition to live there or not.
'Nuff said.
............ no.
Not when the only options for off-campus housing are cheap apartments, run-down houses that no one takes care of, and way-too-expensive apartments that only the extremely rich can afford.
At my school, on-campus is the only way to live. The T1 is a nice added bonus.
I went to UNBC (University of Northern British Columbia) in scenic Prince George, and there was access in all of the dorms. Mind you, it is a small school.
is it just me, or is it not at least mildly disturbing that someone's college life can be _defined_ by the bandwidth of their network connections?
:)
i'm in college, and while the high bandwidth is great, all it means to me is that slashdot and the 5 other sites i visit regularly load up faster. sometimes it also means that downloading that > 10 meg file isn't that big a deal.
those people whose lives are being defined by this "bandwidth glut" should perhaps re-evaluate how they're spending their free time
I'm probably going to ruffle some feathers by mentioning this in a non-CWRU (Case Western Reserve University) forum, but so be it...
CWRU installed an ATM network long before their technology was stable, and as a result, the network was down a significant portion of the time, and you could count on it going down at the times when it was utilized and important (such as before finals.) That decision was made not with the best student interests in mind, but with publicity-oriented politics handed down from on high. As a result partially of that, CWRU was voted Yahoo!'s Most Wired Campus in 1999, but was less of a testament to it's fantastic high speed network, and more of a Bill Clinton-style Legacy Building attempt by the out-going CIO. Much of the information cited in that award, such as 90% of facilities availble around the clock and 25MB of free web space, were not really true, and the topic of much controversy at CWRU for months thereafter. The University made lots of excuses of how that really was policy despite the fact that nobody knew about it, and the U didn't have the resources to back it up even if they wanted to.
My point: High speed net access is great, but many Universities use it as a selling point rather than a resource. When it becomes a political marketing tool, it's reliability suffers, and the students are the ones left out in the cold. As a student, there are MANY times I would have much rather had a 33.6 modem and a simple network that worked, than a space-age technological marvel that swallowed my code and locked up my homework the night before it was due...
Notice: Your mouse has been moved. Windows will now restart so this change can take effect.
...as long as you give me royalties.
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
In many UK universities it is common to have network links in campus/college rooms. This has created a culture of its own in many places with all sorts of gaming clans/IRC networks being formed. The funny thing is the way many students will encrypt their comunications in order to not be detected by authorities if they think that what they're doing is not allowed. I've seen some really nice methods used although mentioning names could be silly.
In many cases there is a nice culture going which makes you feel quite priveleged to be able to access.
Ok, this is completely off topic, but you mentioning these things reminded me.. I know quite a few people in my dorm run these things from alladvantage & whatnot. Now, I thought they were pretty much scams, but I have seen people's checks for about $40-$50, so I wouldn't necessarily classify it as a scam. I guess it's good if you don't mind blowing a bunch of screen real-estate on a stupid ad.. my thought was, how hard would it be to write a cheap Linux program that simulates sending/receiving whatever the important packets are, so alladvantage thinks you have their program running constantly? Not that I'd ever even think of doing something so.. uhh.. not-so-legal?
-mike kania
Here at University, ethernet is still fairly new. The first couple dorms had it installed about 4 years ago. The remodeling program continues to date, and is being handled, naturally, pretty ineffectively. Regardless, the presence of ethernet on campus NOT ONLY influenced my choice in dorms, it influenced my choice in schools. This is a great university, but it is not the best i could have attended. It IS, however, the best that offered/intended to offer ethernet to their students in the reasonable future.
Yes, moving off campus (and away from 10Mbps) hurt. A LOT. My time spent online, and my productivity have both decreased as a result of my choice, and the @Home cable modem is a poor replacement. (IP masqing is wonderful, but the cable modem itself isn't great....) Why do dorms have to be so expensive? At most public institutions, this one included, the school isn't supposed to profit at the cost of the students, are they? Couldn't some of that multi-million $$$ (semi-professional) college sports money be used to make either the cost of the housing less, or the worth of the housing more? Paying more to share a room w/some schmuck you've never met before, than you do to live in an apartment w/your own bedroom still seems unreasonable....
Let's face it, 10Mb is pitifully slow. Networking hardware is vastly superior to that, and has been for some considerable time.
Fitting the dorms with 10Mb ethernet is basically saying "we don't want to waste money storing these old cables, and this router is a pathetic piece of trash we couldn't pay anyone to take away, so we'll make you have it, AND charge you for the privilage of having our scraps and left-overs, either in rent or gratitude. Grovel before us, pathetic scum, for you shall sing our praises for giving you this scrap-iron and calling it a benefit!"
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Now that I'm out in the real world, I have a cable modem, and it sucks. But I don't think I will ever have it as good as in college. The biggest problem we had were people who ran servers for *huge* amount of warez and pron. I new people that served 10 or 20 gigs a day. Any service I pay for in the real world, isn't going to allow such huge serevers (and they shouldn't). But my cable modem connection upload is capped to a point to make it unusable for anything other than requesting web pages.
If you can't tell, I'm in severe withdrawl right now.
Reminds me of that romantic storyline starting here.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
More recently I've met a number of people in their 30s who use the usual criteria for selecting a town to live in, (I'm in the Route 128 area), such as quality of schools, distance to work; but they are now adding availability of cable modem or DSL to that list.
I was in the Mediaone cable beta program three years ago, and I can't imagine going back to dialup. It really changes the way you do things, more because of the instant availability than the speed. My family (including my 6-year old daughter) turns to the net as a first resource for finding telephone numbers, movie listings, restaurant reviews and menus, etc.
Cable also enables telecommuting. The availability of cable along with the techie shortage encourages companies to be very tolerant of telecommuting. Of the numerous job offers I'm considering now, two are local and permit telecommuting 2-3 days/week. Another is out of state; I couldn't even consider working for them without cable.
If I had to move, cable modem availability would definitely be a prime consideration.
Why in the world would I be going to college if I didn't have a fast connection? Its the only thing keeping me here, im sure not learning anything as a freshmen!
...they've only agreed to merge (at least the head honchos). It's still up to the shareholders and the regulators. If they *do* merge, it'll be late in the year...
I was working at CNN when the Turner/TW merger was announced. All the media jumped all over it, just like now - but it was quite a while before it actually happened.
"People" using "unnecessary" quotes should be "shot".
I have to admit, without the 10BaseT connection to the internet, i would never have totally switched to linux. I have to say that it probably is one of the greater things about living on campus. But what about when we all get pissed of living here and move out? we get high speed connections from the phone company...i think they should give us free long distance for that or something!
JediLuke
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
I graduated from Pacific Lutheran University just over 1.5 years ago. I was there when the dorms were moved from 9600 baud "Xyplex" connections to 10 Mb ethernet connections. In fact my roommate became the Network Admin who did all that wiring. We pushed our whole freshmen and half our sophmore years for the University to make the switch. People all over campus became jeoulous of our dorm for the second half of our sophmore year because ours was the only one to be allowed on the network in this fashion as we were the test-bed dorm.
When I graduated DSL had just been introduced into our area and I made a point of finding an appartment that would have a high probability of getting it. It worked.
However, about 5 months ago I moved into a new house. You would think that the developers would have seen the want for DSL into the community coming but no, they laid lines into the community that are just outside of the distance requirement for such piss poor thin cable. My roomates and I have been fighting for our DSL connection since we moved in. We all have experienced the joy of high speed.
I am a high-speed junkie.
This has been something of an issue here at Duke for a little while. For years there has been a tradition of Duke students camping out on the front lawn of the athletics building for admission into the men's basketball games. Duke has just completed some additional construction to the athletics complex. While they were at it, they ran cabling everywhere and have added ethernet jacks at the base of all lamp posts on that lawn so students who are camping out can be on the network.
It was also interesting to read how universities are trying to deal with students trading illegal MP3s and the like. Duke administrators have been struggling with this issue as well, especially after the recent crackdown at Carnegie-Mellon.
Sargent
For those who are unaware, Student nets and dorms are typically placed onto the _worst_ segments in the entire network.
And another thing... I'm sooo sick of people thinking they have the amount of bandwidth that the port comes labeled as.
If you're plugged into a TX port, that does NOT mean that you have 100Mbps connectivity. Ever heard of cascading switches?
Take a group of 10 switches and arrange them like you would bowling pins. Say these switches have 64 ports each. The top switch in this network (student-net) is connected to the backbone via a single true TX fiber connection. Just for good measure, let's say it's FD. If there is any sort of port contention at all on this network, everyone in it is sharing a single 100Mbps connection to the backbone.
With 10 switches here, and 600 students, each student actually averages 100/600 = 0.1666Mbps.
This is of course if the network is saturated, which it is most likely to be at night.
Not only this, but we're assuming here that network throughput is determined by octets/second.
This is a layman's way of measuring throughput, and in no way reflects reality. I could spend months arguing different ways of defining alpha in a bridged network, but let's just take a very general stab at it.
Typically, in generic terms, in a network of 600 nodes within a single broadcast domain, you could expect peak throughput of MAYBE 50Mbps.
Factor in all the wingates, multicast gamers, and fools who install win32, bind everything to the adapter and say 'IT WORKS!' and leave the configuration that way. netbeui, netbios client all configured within the workgroup 'Workgroup' spamming each other. I AM HERE. I AM HERE. WHO ARE YOU WHO ARE YOU.
Bottom line is I get upset by poeple who think "Hey, this is a 100-TX port... GUYS I am l337, I have 100Mbps to the internet"
The problem is probably mine, but I can't believe the sheer number of people (including professionals) who have absolutely NO IDEA how their network works, and how services on it affect the pipes.
-rant over.
I have been saying this for months, I am addited to my ethernet. Just run a line right into my arm please! When I go home I have withdrawls and I stare at my old computer with is ancient modem and just think of the possibilities of having a cable modem or what not. I weep for computers that have slow connections and how they are wasted. I have already decided I never want to use a modem again and oh yes, brilliant move by AOL, as much as I hate them. I am some what excited by the fact that yes I may soon be able to get a cable modem and then it will all be good. -Fortytwo
I am trying to decide what school to go to in september. The connection is a big deal. I'm leaning towards going to the 30,000/year school cause of the wired DSL instead of the local 10,000 school even though I can't afford it.
Since I Internet for about 30 euro per month, it is almost worth moving (but there were other reasons too).
nosig today
I don't know if UCLA was one of the first colleges to offer free dial-up or not, but it was great. Back in 1994, I had free access to all usenet and the www from my apartment across town. Plus there was no spam or eCommerce sites. It was really cool. I'm thinking of going to graduate school just to get my hands on the Internet 2.
I think I saw TLC on MSNBC the other night!
Free music from Jack Merlot.
Since I live off campus I don't have that availability. Fortunately Purdue is offering DSL at a discount (you don't pay ISP fee) so you can get 768k down / 128k up for $40 a month. Not terrible, and satisfies most of my bandwidth needs. Otherwise I just go to work and use the PC's there and then send stuff to my box. You can also get Cable Modems out here too. It's amazing that somewhere in Indiana has some real technology.
.org. My personal interpretation is that it should be OK as long as it is not a commercial site. A fellow Slashdotter got hit by Purdue for that one!
Purdue has recently done some complaining about domains pointed at resnet.purdue.edu addresses. According to them it is not allowed, even if it is a
I just got Sympatico warp here in Newfoundland Canada. I got a warp 3 which is 1024kbps down and 512kbps up(some of my friends say is 1024). :)
The biggest change has been being connected 24/7. I can wake up in the moring and go online and at lunch and then for 2 hours after school and then 3-4 hours before I go to bed. No time limites, no disconnecting/connecting. Because of this I tend to keep staying up at night later and later and find my self sleeping in and falling asleep in class.
The + side of it is being able to listen to Shoutcast and real audio and video any/all the time. I have also found my self watching very little TV.
And to stay on topic, since ADSL has come to my town, the town has turned into one big dorm.
God, root, what is the difference?
modems? thats *so* 90s
Network access at universities, certainly on this side of the pond, is considered a privilege rather than a right. The primary purpose of academic network connections is for academic-related work, which is hardly surprising as they wouldn't get funded otherwise. What this means is that your use of the network is technically for coursework-related stuff only. Just because the bandwidth is there doesn't mean you have to waste it on 24hr streaming video and warez servers. Be responsible in your use of the network or that connection you're so proud of might just disappear.
Use it responsibly or lose it - if more than a certain amount of campus network traffic was seen to be coming from a particular machine there wouldn't be network access for that machine (or that hall, even) any more.
I didn't have a network connection in my room as a student, and had to go to the computer centre instead. However, plenty of universities have had network access from halls for years. This story is only news because the Internet is now of interest to yer everyday person rather than only of interest to CS weenies. Access for downloading stuff is useful, sure, but apart from that I'd consider people who spend all their time in their room on the net to be missing out on student life to a certain extent.
I later got a 300 baud modem.
Once I even had to use punch cards!
RSI injured geek wins against Mattel, Mattel still retaliates!
I'm currently a junior and I never lived in the dorms so I never experienced high bandwidth as a lifestyle, but I tend to spend a lot of time in the on campus computer labs for the speed.
I also actively seek out jobs that have high speed connections, I currently work for an ISP, and have turned down other, higher paying, jobs because they "only" had corporate DSL.
I was upset to find out that I couldn't get DSL in my current apartment complex, so when my lease is up in couple of months, I'm seriously considering moving to the complex across the street, which is DSL eligible.
Currently I'm not suffering from bandwidth withdrawal because I found ways to avoid it. I have a 15 gig hard drive mounted in a removeable rack so I can download what I want to it while I'm on a fat pipe. I also have SSH access to some dedicated linux boxen on the school network that I can use for getting whatever I need on a high speed connection so I can go in a get it at my leisure, either by overnight modem download or the previously mentioned removeable hard drive.
My current modem usage, 218 hours in 13 days, nobody even bothers to call me any more because they know they'll get a busy signal, they just page me and have me call them back.
Now, I work at an Internet media company with multiple OC-12's and have a Cable Modem at home. If I download a file and the rate is *BELOW* 20, I disconnect and try to find a faster server. Downloading large files like Linux ISO's irritate me because 720 Megabytes *might* take 10 minutes to download. I hate traveling with my laptop, because I'm limited to 53K again. What do you do when you get an entire generation of me out there? Fiber to the curb!
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
You know what, I just don't know about that Christopher fellow.
He used to spend time with us here in the market place, but ever since Guttenberg invented printed books, he's become a recluse.
He just sits there, burning perfectly good candles at night, reading and mumbling about 'feeding his head'.
You know, I don't think he's even bothered to plow his field this season. Surely, these books are the work of the devil.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I always remembered having trouble getting net access when I went to college. Now, looking for an investment, I bought a moderate 50-unit apartment building near my old school and wired the entire building with 100-BaseT ethernet and got a (speedwise equivalent of) T3 connection to the net. The cost is spread over the rent charged to tenants. The result has been successful beyond my wildest dreams. I've never had an empty apartment fore more than a day or two since and now have a waiting list! I may acquire more buildings in the area soon. The result was so cool that decided to live on site and combined 4 units downstairs into a large pad for myself and work as the sysadmin for the building, where I've set up some common resources (mail servers, web servers, etc.) Other staff handle the mundane stuff [collections, repairs, security, etc.]). Oh, and did I mention that I rent the apts to women only? (modeled after the 'senior-only' and 'sorority house' legal precedents to avoid discrimination lawsuits). All women. All except for me! I love my life!
The reason all these schools have these connections isn't so students can do work bettter...it's because the students will come and live on campus longer. Hence the school makes more money. The suppliers are also in on it cause the students get hooked and then want high speed access outside of school when they graduate. Like most things in life, its politics and it's about money.
'Generation X' refers to people born between 1960 and 1980.
Leaving aside the 60's for a second...
If I was born in 1970, then I'd be "20-something" during the 90's. If I was born in 1980 I'd be a teen during the 90's. So far this is exactly what I said.
As for the 60's: Are you seriously telling me that you consider someone who is within months of being 40 in 1999 a Generation Xer? Get real.
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Personally, I'm going to see if I can get a phd so that I can become a professor and stay on fast college networks for the rest of my life.
I was in the dorms for about a year, had the wonderful fast access (mmmm, a 10meg segment of a DS3 dedicated to only campus Internet access, switched hubs in a closet in the dorm buildings, two ports in each room....mmmm....::drool:: but I digress...) and then, thanks to CalPoly's happy mega-admissions, had to throw all but 200 of the returning students out of the dorms. The rest of the dorms were for new students only. So I and several hundred broadband junkies found ourselves in apartments...with, what's this, a MODEM?! No! Say it ain't so! I suffered along at around 40k for a few months, then heard the wonderful news...PacBell was going to bring DSL to our area! Excellent! They had me by the bandwidth balls, waiting and waiting...calling every week or two, finding out how much closer they were...then the bastards did the unthinkable. They announced that it was available...before it really was. After this wonderful rush at the announcement then the crash when I found it was false...they did it again. And then again! Couldn't this cold, heartless phone company see what they were doing to me and my fellow high-speed low-latency addicts?
At long last, it came to reality. I was among the first 40 or so in town to order it. I happily signed my life away with a 1-year contract, tossed the cash at them, and got an install date...NO! Another two weeks! These sadistic bastards must really have it out for me...
I got a call from my roommate on the install day, about an hour before I was expecting them to show up (I was still at work). I raced home and watched closely over the techs as they installed the splitter, hooked up the adapter box, and switched it on....I plugged myself in, hit
And for those that actually sat through and read this whole thing...have a lollipop.
I chose my apartment (I work in RTP) based pretty much on the fact that there was (just) a T1 line to all the apartments. And contrary to what seems logical for this computer-oriented area, there is no cable-modem or DSL access as of yet. I can never go back...I'll have to live in this apartment until at least 1.5Mbs is widespread!
Well, here goes...
In 1996 I enrolled @ UW and moved into a dorm w/ 10Base-T ethernet. I then proceeded to realize two things:
1) My time spent on-line was interfering greatly w/ my studies.
2) College was interfering w/ my life
I then proceeded to quit school (was pursuing a CS degree) and got a job in my field of choice instead. I figure it this way... (not to detract from those that find college useful) if I work for 5 years (that's how long the degree I was pursuing would have taken) instead of going to school for that time, I'll a) save about $50,000 and I'll make 20,000 to $60,000+ per year (increasing over time). So, basically, college would have cost me about $50,000 to get to the same place I'll be at anyway in about 2 years (that's how much time I have left).
High bandwidth is like a drug ('specially if your used to dail-up pre-college) and you feel almost compelled to take advantage of the increadible speeds....I mean...wouldn't it be borderline evil not to?
-fp
Moved off campus after my first year. It was a deal maker. I was prepared to leave the school and head back home to live with my mother if she had not agreed to let me live off campus. Put up with a modem connection for the next 2.5 years before getting ADSL in my apartment about 5 miles from campus.
I got my own bedroom (master suite at that), two closests (the smallest being 2x as big as the one in the dorm), and my own bathroom. Internet connectivity really didn't matter to me, the dorms where such sh*tholes. But now that we have ADSL here, I'm as happy as a clam, and can never see myself living in another college dorm either.
I did meet my 2 roommates living in my Freshman only dorm, but that is the only good thing that came out of it. The Housing Dept probably still has a file on me and all of my floor-mates and how anti-social we are and should never be allowed to live in another dorm again, etc etc.
OTOH, my sister just started college this year at Univ of MD and loves the dorm. I guess she doesn't mind living in a high-rise with no cable service -- they elected to get Ethernet over cable for some odd reason. Don't think that the dorm as AC either.
(what follows is somewhat rant-ish.)
I graduated in '96, from Emory University in Atlanta. All the dorms had fast net access my final year there, but I lived off-campus with a 28.8, and a LAN built on Thinnet (Coax-- remember that? And those annoying little terminators?) We couldn't download worth a crap, but boy did my roommates and I play a lot of Doom on the LAN. It doesn't seem like long ago at all (even watching the video I took when I was a frosh in '93 made it seem like yesterday) but then I shudder to think how much things have changed even since I graduated.
Some things stay the same though. We have 3 gaming systems in our apartment (with 2 people), and the slowest is a P2-300/128MB with SLI'd voodoo2's. We have everything going through a 10/100 switch, and one NT box (serving 8GB of MP3's and running all the game servers) and one linux (SuSE) box for testing purposes, soon to be a firewall and additional MP3 share among other things. In a couple months, we upgrade our main systems to Athlons, and then there will be 5 game-worthy clients sitting around our apartment. So what's our internet connection?
......56k modems. I'm SO sick and tired of seeing broadband ads on TV, DSL ads on my ISP's site, and every other fast-access company telling me about the great services that aren't available in my apartment complex yet! However, 700k SDSL will be installed "real soon now" from the ISP my roommate works for. They are "in the preliminary stages of considering to begin thinking about processing applications, maybe."
You college kids... you're so spoiled. You just wait till you get out into the real world and have to suffer with sub-ethernet speeds. Hahahaha. And then a year after YOU graduate, all the dorms will have 10-gigabit connections, and people will be watching streaming HDTV with dolby digital surround over the net!! HA!!!!
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
I never lived on-campus when i was in school but I had a cablemodem in my apartment. In my second term, I moved to a new apartment downtown and just assumed it was cable ready. When I found out it wasn't, and wouldn't be ready for another 6 months, I took a gravy job as a lab tech so I'd have a reasonable excuse for spending hours at school on the fat pipe. Needless to say, I'm back on cable and my zip disk collection has accumulated some serious dust. =)
Also, my gf's friend is about as Joe Average Computer user as they come and she got cable modem installed because she was used to the speed.
strain
"I put the sin in syntax, baby"
Cambridge University (UK) started this in around 1994, and completed in 1997. I've been living with this since 1996. However, the "loss of life" hasn't really happened, possibly apart from Quake.
We also don't really have the heavy-handed sysadmin issues a lot of US colleges seem to have, although our Computing Service are in theory pretty draconian. Maybe people here just accept the AUP's, at least as far as they relate to bandwidth hogging, spamming and central systems.
The filter of grads into places like BT and Cambridge-area tech businesses has hastened ADSL and always-on fixed fee type arrangements by the telcos, which are *finally* coming to the UK now.
If you check around the contrib files you find there are a lot of Cambridge people working on OSS projects like Debian, probably because of the access they get.
The thing is that in general the lusers now coming in don't get beyond M$ cluelessness in their knowledge and ability. A few years ago, if you wanted to email, you *had* to learn a little *nix, so even arts students knew some. A lot of people aren't progressing beyond the GUI now. This is an underplayed issue, I think - the day is coming where you really will need a computer science or computer engineering (shudder) degree to learn how systems work. Do people think this fear is correct?
1990: (pre-ISP days) enroll in grad school to keep next access we became addicted to as undergrads. 2000: Enroll in summer school/extra senior year to keep high speed access. What sort of withdrawl symptoms do these high speed residents have when they go home for the holidays ? Ojing. ojingeo@yahoo.com
You young'uns have it good! Why in my day, we had to carry our TCP/IP packets in BUCKETS. UPHILL. BOTH WAYS! In the melting Texas heat, no less.
I would have killed any number of gnomies to have had that in my dorm room. This is the ugly face of envy.
--binkley
So I've been on the computer for a while writing code. Dissatisfaction bug (you know, that bug without which we would never do anything) says "waaa!", so I briefly consider my options and decide to play a video game. Play a video game a while. Bug says "waaa!". Consider options. Go on IRC. Do IRC for a while. Bug goes "waaa!". Consider options. Go back to coding.... WHAT'S WRON WITH THIS PICTURE? I'll tell you. How come, when I'm considering my oprtions, I don't choose a non-computer option? Huh? It's like being on the computer for a long time *molds* my consciousness into a shape more suited for being on the computer, and less suited to doing other stuff. Being on the computer for a long time makes me more into a computer person. Good or Ill? Ill I say. Machines, tho vastly palatable and convenient, are finite. Reality, nature, people, etc... is infinite. Computers point straight into the land of dreams. Dreams are hollow.
I always chafed at the setup time required to find stuff when it was stored physically -- hauling out those wooden card catalog drawers, loading up the microfiche viewers, poking people with those newspapers-on-a-stick. You'd spend ten minutes setting up for every minute you'd spend reading. That's fatiguing. Searching electronically makes it truly effortless to read widely. All that's left to do is the actual reading part. Judging by the comments here, though, that's still the hardest part.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
This year I'm a freshman, and living in the dorms.
Totally digging the T3 action. Next year, me and
a few of my friends decided we need off campus...
Where to move? Of course! A near-by appartment
complex with a T1! That was our selling point, we
didn't even consider checking out elsewere, as it
meant using a dial-up. I'm already tweaking just
using for the duration of my winter holiday!
So I've been on the computer for a while writing code. Dissatisfaction bug (you know, that bug without which we would never do anything) says "waaa!", so I briefly consider my options and decide to play a video game. Play a video game a while. Bug says "waaa!". Consider options. Go on IRC. Do IRC for a while. Bug goes "waaa!". Consider options. Go back to coding.... WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? I'll tell you. How come, when I'm considering my oprtions, I don't choose a non-computer option? Huh? It's like being on the computer for a long time *molds* my consciousness into a shape more suited for being on the computer, and less suited to doing other stuff. Being on the computer for a long time makes me more into a computer person. Good or Ill? Ill I say. Machines, tho vastly palatable and convenient, are finite. Reality, nature, people, etc... is infinite. Computers point straight into the land of dreams. Dreams are hollow.
This article is basically a summation of my existance. I am a college senior. I make all my decisions about where I live, when I go back home and what computers come or stay based on the connection. Here at school (Georgia Tech) we have Residential network. At home (parents) we have a Masqueraded ADSL connection for all the PC's in the house on the LAN. While the ADSL is not as fast, it's never busy unlike the dorm network. Before my parent got their connection I really didn't want to leave school and visit them for extended periods. I would usually wait around a couple days after the quarter ended before I went home. I would also come back a few days early because I could not stand the modem usage.
A while back when Slashdot had an article about 100Mbps Optical connections that Bellsouth was testing I immediately contacted them about getting hooked up. Unfortunately they are only testing it in the Dunwoody area of Atlanta. I now want to live there when I graduate. It's only like 10 minutes from here.
Furthermore, while all of my friends live off campus I choose to stay. Why? T1 connection. BellSouth has really dragged their heels getting xDSL connections setup. Mostly it's because they are still setting up infrastructure. My parents got lucky when they signed up. I know people who have moved off campus and signed up for xDSL service with Speak-easy, who resells BellSouth in this area, who, after being jerked around on the phones for nearly 2 MONTHS, still don't have an installation date. Before that they tried broadband. They waited 5 months for the service to become availble only to find out they weren't going to get it because of some distribution issue. Now they are forced into cable modems which have lots-o-users in the area (Does that actually affect speed? I must admit ignorance about cable modems). Anyway, all these reasons have kept me on campus and with my dear, sweet, lovely T1 line.
(homer talk)
Oooh, baby, Did all that talk scare you? Shhhhh... I'll never leave you....
(/homer talk)
Well, that is until I graduate, then I'll have to buy one of my own. Or I could stay in school until they finally roll out ADSL everywhere. Yeah, that sounds like a plan!
And besides where else could I download and burn a CD of the most recent Linux ISO's in under 30 minutes?
You might ask if i have a life other than computers and computer games. Sure I do. You mean with real people? Yep. Do you sit around and dicuss computers? Nope, everything but.
Basically what I'm saying is that a person can be addicted to high speed access and still have a normal (?) life / social life. It just becomes a question of using the time you spend online right, like reading slashdot.
The next remark is false. The previous remark is true.
______________________________________
um, sigs should be heard and not seen?
rooooar
These comments remind me of the drug
culture. Interesting isn't it, a network
connection has replaced a dealer connection.
A good dose of NAT/Firewall and non-qualified dhcp addresses to the internal network would at least confine all the the piracy to within the LAN.
While some may think this is humorous, I have an ex-roomate who dreamed of doing this exact thing. I don't know whether to laugh, cry or say, "Bill, that you? You're still hitting that bong, aren't you bill?"
All I hear these days about cable modems is that they are really slow, and people are constantly getting hacked.
I just got a cable modem. If the speed I'm getting is slow, the other connection speeds must be mind-boggling. It's fast enough that the bottleneck is usually at the other end of the pipe.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
If anything, I see less coverage of the MP3 situation these days.
-jwb
In a way, I'm rather bemused by all the talk of wired dorms, and people being required to stay in dorms their freshman year...
At the university I attended (University of Louisville), you literally cannot get campus housing, period, if you live within thirty miles of the campus--so in essence, if you live ANYWHERE in Jefferson County, KY you can't get campus housing. The CLOSEST one can hope to get to campus housing is a co-op (read: indentured slavery) program with UPS for housing near UPS as long as one does co-op work for Oops Inc. :P
AFAIK the dorms at U of L are probably not wired, either (of course, we poor city-students would never know that...we aren't allowed dorms, because they are short of dorm space to the point where many houses are rented out for student apartments near the campus...)...then again, it IS a state university that seems to concentrate on its athletic program to the detriment of what was once one of the better engineering schools in the US (Speed Scientific School)...
Fortunately, the school has X-terms damn near everywhere in the Speed School areas :) so most folks just hop on the X-terms...
Then again, Louisville isn't particularly wired at all, though. Even though we have no less than three big ISPs in the area, one which is supposedly going to be a backbone site soon, the fastest options are Insight@Home (which as we all know, @Home is about to be UDPd because their abuse department mail goes to /dev/null, so THAT sucks) and HellSouth ADSL (which can only be installed if you are less than 5 miles from a switching station, and if there is no fiber between you and the switching station, and only if you are running Win95/98 or MacOS 8, and only if there is no "old copper" between you and the switching station, and only if you are willing to pay $400 for installation and $80/month (regular line cost of $20/month + $60/month for ADSL), and only if you are willing to pay MORE per month if you don't want to use Hellsouth.net [in Louisville they actually charge you MORE if you want to go with one of the local ISPs that support ADSL like iglou.com--and the average cost of ISPs here is around $17.50-$20.00/month, but Hellsouth specifically charges extra if you don't want to use Hellsouth.net], and only if the stars are right and you are willing to give your firstborn child...). The cable, we're fucked on till 2006 (because our beloved city and county officials [NOT] signed exclusive monopoly agreements with what was then Storer Cable for 25 years, and the cable franchises run out respectively in 2002 and 2006 (if memory serves) so we can't get anyone else to get cable service from) and with ADSL we're as badly and permanently fucked as anyone unfortunate enough to be in Hellsouth country (they charge out the arse so they can sell frac-T1 lines; they have pretty well locked everyone else out of the local residential phone market by charging telcos the same rates they would charge businesses to lease lines (which are among the most expensive in the US, and which make it literally impossible for ANY company to provide local phone service cheaper than Hellsouth unless they lay the line directly to one's house) and do other crap like charging MORE if you don't want to go with Hellsouth because you have an ISP already [so it's the same crap as you'd have dealing with Insight@Home, except it is far likelier that you can actually get Insight@Home installed and running] and illegally offering data services before they've even opened up the local phone monopoly (which I don't see them doing until a) someone who can lay lines like Sprint comes in, b) a class-action lawsuit is filed against Hellsouth, or c) the FCC finally gets the cojones up to give Hellsouth the spanking it so badly deserves)...).
(Did I mention that monopolies in general truly suck and actually DECREASE options for consumers? I pray every day that someone comes in to break the phone monopoly (and I don't care whom--Sprint, Unidial, two kids with cans and a string--I ain't choosy at this point) so I don't have to deal with the heap of incompetence that makes US Worst actually look GOOD that is Hellsouth, and so I don't have to wait for @Home to be spanked into submission and them having to open the cable up without making me pay for @Home as an ISP as well as a cable feed (I have my own local ISP, thank you, and I'd rather use them, thanks)...)
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
High speed internet access is like an addictive drug !
When I lived in Canada (4 years ago) I used to have a cable modem. I fell in love with that thing from day one. I got totally hooked on the speed, reliability, and perpetual connection.
Three years ago my career moved me to Texas, and, from an internet connectivity point, things have been going down hill ever since. Initially I had to go to a 56K connection which, although slow, didn't seem too bad.
A year and a half ago I moved to another job outside Houston, and my internet connection speed has been reduced again - 28.8k on a rare day, normally 26.4k, though.
I have to admit, I am scared to move again; 300 baud modems are hard to find nowadays !
Neither DSL, ISDN, 56K, nor cable modem service is available in my area. The official telco line is that they have no plans to introduce any new services in the near future. I expect it to be for at least a decade before even intermediate bandwith access arrives where I now live.
I could see how connectivity becomes an issue in relocation and job offer evaluation. I seriously contemplated moving closer to Houston to get DSL, but that'll add 60 extra miles commute to/from work each day.
Yeah, I got hooked on the high speed access. Then I moved out from college into the real world - just like all those other college kids will have to - and got a stiff dose of reality.
I have also learned that the virtual world is nothing in comparison to the real world.
But, just like a drug the withdrawl pains are a bitch !
Second, to tell you the truth, I have no idea what I *would* do with high speed access. Here in the backwoods of South Carolina, we still use an old, antiquated POTS (its so old that my house still has an in-the-wall mounted rotary phone that's still hardwired to the system and works!) that maybe uses up the full potential of a 56K modem on a good day. If I have ever needed to download large files, I'll usually leave my machine online overnight while I sleep, or do something else while its downloading.
I'm not saying that I haven't used high speed access before. The tech school I currently go to has a T1 connection. Although I do most of my net access at home, I do appreciate it when I use a system at school.
And the thing that gets me is that most of these high-speed ppl dont appreciate what they have. It's kinda like being w/o electricity, you dont appreciate what you have until you don't have it anymore.
-- Word of the day: Percussive maintenance is the fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it wo
In the US, in the first part of last/this century(depending on how you look at the whole decade/century/millenium thing), the federal government had to step in with the Rural Electrication Project to make sure that everyone, even the farmers, had electricty. The same thing happened with telephones. Now, everyting is deregulated. It will be years before any sort of decent broadband shows up in rural areas. Lots of people don't even have cable TV. I don't want to be a "rat in a cage" living in the suburbs just to get DSL or a cable modem. The federal goverment needs to step in, and force telcos to bring real net access to everybody. The internet isn't an extravagance like Cable TV. It is a necessity like Electricy and Telephone. SHOOT ME if I ever explain where I live in terms of a beltway. "More recently I've met a number of people in their 30s who use the usual criteria for selecting a town to live in, (I'm in the Route 128 area), such as quality of schools..."
Having gone to this college a few years ago for a year, leaving for a year, and coming back to work for them, I can speak from both sides of the fence (now how often can you do that in real life?)
Back when I was here, the only network the college had was a lab of Mac's, and a college that was renting space from us had a lab of 486's with a shared ISDN. Internet browsing was so slow, it was ridiculous, and the dorms were not wired at all. In fact, at the time, there wasn't even cable in all rooms, and only one phone per room.
The next year, the year I was gone, the college began a technology initiative. They put a phone per person in each room, a cable line in each room, and 10 Meg Ethernet for each person. They purchased a T1, and have everyone on that. They also junked the Mac lab, and got two labs of 30 PC's each, all networked.
Now, all students have the option to buy their own computer from the college, all supported for the duration of their stay. They have the 10 Meg Ethernet. At the moment, we have about 1/3 of our resident students using the net. The labs all get 90-100% usage while they're open.
Next year, we'll start a new initiative. All students will be getting mandatory laptops, included in their tuition (for financial aid... if they bought them separately, then they wouldn't be able to put it under financial aid.). They'll all have wireless cards, so they can use them in the classroom without wires all over the place, and out on the green, down at the beach, and in unwired places, or places that can't take 30 wires running in and sitting there. These laptops will have wired 10/100 cards, to use in their dorm rooms and wired areas (We don't have the money at the moment to get total campus wireless coverage... that's next year, after we have a plan laid out and set.)
Myself, I am sorta addicted to the high speed. I got my T1 connection here at work, and grab what I need during the day, and burn it on CD if important. Then, at night, on my 56K connection, I use my Linux server and my workstation, both of which have VNC on them, to surf. I also have Winamp with Shoutcast bound to my sound on them, so whatever I play, gets burst through Shoutcast to home. Only thing I can't do is play games on the college network from home using my VNC'd workstation.(VNC is good, but even it can't keep up with games, even sitting on the same leg of the network as the machine playing the game!)
Then, the cable company's starting cable modem rollout's next month. The fun'll really start then.
Any questions, comments, well, you know what to do with my e-mail.
When I was in college, not too long ago, but before the web was big, I had a computer in my room. Before college I was an obsessive hacker, writing all sorts code all the time. And after college I did the same thing. But when I was in college, I always felt like there was so much to do, so many things to try, so many practical jokes to pull, so many people to run into, that I hardly ever turned on that computer except to do classwork.
The thing is, you can spend the rest of your life at some boring job surfing the web and diddling through email for a few hours a day. Or you can do the same thing while hiding from the wife and kid at home, saying that you're working on something important. But why someone in college would want to be glued to a monitor is beyond me.
Bandwidth convinced me to move on campus.
Sonny, when I went to college the "HS" light still came on when my modem hit 1200 bps! Hrumph. Kids these days.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Care to give more information ? I'm flying tomorrow to Chicago to find an apartment ( I'll begin worjking there very soon ) and I'd like to get an apartment with a high-speed connection.
Thanks
Go ahead and give this one, but I can't see any reason for you to give #130 a score of '0'; it's funny and insightful.
Sure, my campus has 10Mbit ethernet in each dorm room, but I have substantially faster transfer rates and much less lag off campus using xDSL from a local ISP. Besides, the university has that pesky firewall that prevents anyone from talking to me.
Here's a "short" (there are over 160) list to start with:
http://www.internet2.edu/html/members.html
More important, I think, is the overall bandwidth availability on and off campus, so you're not stuck in the dorms just to stay connected.
If anyone else is in my situation, you owe it to yourself to check out these pages, if you haven't already done so:
http://www.vpn.outer.net/2e/vpnssh.html - This site is basically a re-interpretation of the SSH VPN FAQ below, but it's better-written, IMO, and was extremely helpful. I followed its instructions and everything worked beautifully the first time.
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/VPN- 4.html - Another helpful site, the original VPN HOWTO, has the proper location of some of the tools you'll need.
Good luck, and have fun busting huge, gaping holes in your school's firewall. :)
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
If you read the article, they are careful to use words like "often" and "usually", but still: here's another article that discusses MP3s-as-piracy and MP3s-instead-of-buying-CDs without talking about legitimate uses of the format. It's hard to convince people that the MP3 *format* isn't the problem.
--
Brent J. Nordquist N0BJN
I think referring to internet addiction is kind of like referring to an addiction to reading or to knowledge.... is it a bad thing? I make a very good living out of being familiar with and being able to program computers. I probably spend 12-15 hours a day in front of some kind of interface to a network of some type, yet I can still get out and camp, backpack, and spend time in nature because these are things that I also truly enjoy. I think it's a Good Thing to have our up and comers be wired as much as possible, if for no other reason but to be able to compete with the astounding number of high tech folks overseas. I would think that to clasify the whole thing as an addiction is incorrect, it's more a lifestyle choice.
;-)
It's interesting to note that the people noted in the article are neither anti-social nor self-destructive, they merely are choosing to express themselves through a new medium. I say NP
Seriously, if I were TCI or any other cable company or phone company I would abandon every single project I had, put the company 90 million in the hole, and slit my wrists to put broadband out coast-to-coast (with NO restrictions. Servers in every house are fine) and then I would sit back, get some stitches, and scare Bill gates into clipping coupons again when I take the place of the worlds first, second, third, fourth, AND fifth richest person on the planet simply because the numbers, even when expressed in trillions of trillions would make formatting me to only the 1st place impossible....
So why are they scared? The only thing I can think of is that the big bandwidth guys know what comes with it... pirates, MP3 fiends (soon to be JPEG2000 fiends I guess), and full-Linux distro downloads made easy.
The split-second meterware is perfectd and software companies can penalize power users by charging per-use of the software, we will have broadband coast-to-coast.
E.
If it can be proven that "continual computer use is hazardous to your health", will we start seeing required warnings on computer equipment like those on the side of a pack of cigarettes?
Can those that were mislead by the large tech-corporations sue their tormentors for not disclosing this information earlier?
Will we have lobbyists for the Computer Farmers/Growers of America?
Dark questions indeed, but they must be asked! (or, maybe not).
The Other Nate
In my area, attending an expensive ($23k/yr, not OUTRAGEOUS, but not exactly cheap like the $4k/yr state college) university, paying room and board (an extra $5k/yr) and getting on the nice ATM connection they've got going out to the Internet is cheaper than simply paying the price for unlimited use ISDN 128k access. What the hell is wrong with the phone companies and the cable companies?
E.
I choose cable access over DSL mainly because the telephone companies have said on several occasions that they were out to end the "free ride" of the Internet and I don't believe they've changed a single bit.
100MB with gigabit backbones to T3's....speed is your friend until it goes down and you go drinking...it's tough to let go of when high campus rent drives you away.
Kintanon: You are a big loser. It's really sad, some of the people I know on IRC. They exist solely to amass computer parts and probe the web's various online stores in an attempt to find some mispriced item so they can order 65,536 of them and then sell them on eBay. Then they order every single DVD that comes out, watch it once, and then update their listing on some stupid-ass web site that catalogs what DVDs you have and what you paid for them. I don't quite understand the point of buying stuff and then just having it sit around doing nothing especially while there is plenty of money to be made on the stock market or just saving it for something USEFUL. People that sit on their computer at college because they have a fast link are just wasting away their life.
I grew up and went through college predominantly in the pre-ethernet stage of the evolution of Internet on campus.
My freshman year was the first year that the University I attended had a "help desk" to speak of, prior to this, it had been a couple of guys who "knew their stuff" taking calls in the basement of an old building on campus.
The first time I heard of Netscape was when a kid who ran bets in my hall wanted some up-to-date sports scores, at the time I did not know that the 9600 connections and klugey Trumpet Winsock TCP/IP were available to me. When I did find out what the "'Net" was, and that I could have access, I got it, I suffered through hours of trying to get online and configure and install and reconfigure and reboot a few thousand times, it was worth it to me, but not to a lot of other people. In the end I was a little better for the wear, I had learned TCP/IP networking, and basic computer "stuff" along the way and got a job as a tech on campus - I still work in technology, but not doing support, I like my sanity.
So, as my experience led me to actually better myself, the new found medium with which I was enthralled became decreasingly fun as nobody else I knew had the patience to go through the setup to get online.
I think with the new trend of universities giving Internet access, not to mention high speed internet access, as part of the "package" is great. It is really interesting to note how many people, especially those who are not complete tech-heads, are really getting into the Internet and all of the stuff that is out there. It's the perfect vehicle to get people into using PCs (not to the exclusion of Macs) and familiarizing themselves with technology. I think the overall effect of having all of this bandwidth to "play with" in schools will result in a far more resourceful and tech-friendly generation, which is great for the economy.
"I'm disrespectful to dirt! Can you see I am serious?"
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
I prefer 'fake' contact to the real kind. So what? I am the only person that I know thats like that. At my school most people are your basic socializer-partygoer stereotype. The vast majority of people I know are like this, so it isn't an issue. ANd besides, there were antisocials before the Net, too
I met a friend or 2 (lasting), lots of acquaintances, 3 or so real jerks, and an SO with whom I've been >1yr.
The dorms can be hell, once in a while, but sometimes it's fun, and sometimes it's the best thing you ever did.
If you;re having problems, TALK TO YOUR RA. There are plenty of people who can help you with your problems. Universities want to make sure no one kills himself over a drunken-continually roomie or anything. Counselors, Residential Assistants, a lot of people ae available to help you.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
I did have it a bit easier since the Computer Center staff extended a certain favoritism to other geeks.
And I had to walk uphill in snow alot - really, I went to college in Boston. ;]
- tokengeekgrrl
Yeah, but when you go home, you've back in Vancouver.
This monitoring doesn't just encompass web pages either. I know of many colleges that have blocked the opening of certain service ports (such as Real Audio, Napster, or even ftp).
When universities employ tactics such as these, are their students really getting all of the benefits from the Internet...or just the experience the university wants them to have?
My college (Univ. of MD) is extremely liberal when it comes to their access....although recently they are cracking down on MP3 servers, they experience numerous downtimes, and I may be under investigation for a port-scanning incident. Other than that, they are very liberal, indeed ;)
Very few college students actually utilize a 10Mb/s connection to the Internet. Most students share DS-1 (1.5Mb/s) or DS-3 (45.3 Mb/s) WAN connections. Generally, access is faster at well-connected schools, but during peak hours, it often can be analogous to dialup speeds. So the "100x faster" figure is very misleading. Also, when I was in school a few years ago, my job had better Internet access than my school. I suspect this was and is the case for many geeks. So, get a good job and save money on dorm rent.
You're telling me you got 1.6Gbit/s in your dorm? Considering how expensive gigabit switches (or hubs for that matter) are, somehow I'm skeptical that they're going to allow you to do any gigabit channel bonding. Even your '80mbytes/s' (over 600Mbit/s) seems highly dubious. That would require a hell of a lot of 100bT cards channel bonded, or a gigabit card, which sounds suspicious. :)
Unless of course by 'mbyte' you mean millibyte. That sounds a little more accurate
The whole "high-speed access addiction" is true, too. I'm not addicted to the Internet, but I am addicted (in a different way) to high-speed access, in that when I don't have it I go through a sort of withdrawal. Over Christmas break I was back at my parents' house using their 28K modem. Find something I want to download: "A meg and a half? No sweat! (click) (a few seconds pass). What? Whaddaya mean time remaining: ten minutes? ... Oh yeah, I forgot." Fortunately for me, by a year and a half from now (when I graduate) market forces will probably have gotten ADSL installed in most large towns, and I'll have a decent chance of getting it.
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
There is such a thing as a bad situation and a bad dorm. Give your experiences but don't belittle others.
After noticing some people mention that having a high bandwidth connection degrades their education, I feel that I should point out a counterexample. The University of Virginia has implemented a series of classroom, "on-line toolkits" of sorts. Each professor is given easy access to server space where they can post assignments, grades, readings, and whatever they feel is necessary to run a class. Most professors post their files in PDF format. Instead of having to pass out Xerox copies to 450 students during lecture, the professor just points the class to the toolkit URL. The students can read the material directly off their screens, or print it out to read later. The high bandwidth connections allow large documents with both pictures and text to be posted.
UConn is finally finishing soon wiring the entire school onto the 10 megabit network. For a while, tech savvy students would choose to only move into wired dorms only. It caused a weird difference in the type of people who lived in each dorm complex (wired vs non-wired). With the whole campus wired, it will be interesting to see what happens. Maybe location-location-location will be in effect again. I personally dread going home during long breaks without ethernet. The phone lines in my home's neighborhood are so bad that I only get a 28800 connection with a 56K modem. Anyway, another thought. UConn at the beginning of the last semester increased the internet backbone on campus by 10x. It was miracle! I was so happy. The network went from a crawl to incredibly fast. Thanks Qwest!!!
I moved back on to campus last week even though school doesn't start until Feb. 1 here at the University of Maryland. My reasoning? My job is right off campus, I can get away from my family, and most of all, I have a 24/7 high-speed hookup to the net. When I do move out after graduation, high-speed access will be perhaps the most major concern; besides, residences in high-crime areas or without access to public transportation don't yet have high-speed access around here yet anyway.
All the vaxen went away due to Y2K concerns here. They started phasing them out (gotta get rid of all the tenured staff, and migrate them to Solaris) several years ago. I never got my vaxen account
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
I wish those corporations trying to satisfy the public would employ me so I could tell them whats cool and what they need to do.
My college roommate in first year played Quake II all first term. He passed all his exams, 'cause he had been very well prepared back in high school, with his parents and teachers motivating him to work. Second term was spent on IRC and StarCraft, and he failed all his courses with about 4% or so. He's wasting his entire life and he doesn't admit to it... Silly.
Wah!
what's wrong with that? it's part of growing up. it's called LIVING. to be honest i dont think there is anything wrong with being a net junkie. i mean, it's no different than watching tv or whatever, except you can also interact with other people. why is that bad? as long as you have a life in the real world, why is any worse than anything else?
I go to the University of Maryland (as do a lot of other people here, I noticed...) and last year (my freshman year) I got addicted to the high-speed access as well... so when I moved off campus this year my roommates and I are paying almost $300/month for 1.1Mb SDSL (and boy, is it worth it... life would not be worth living if it were not for streaming porn :-)
:-) I love it.
Although I just got offered a job at an ISP which would give me the same speed access, only free
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
-Linus Torvalds
It seems that more and more, especially in the college environment, people are relying on internet based forms of communtications. In my experience, it is not uncommon for people to IM they're neighbor instead of walking next door. Hell, more then once I've had IM conversations with a person I could see across the hall from my dorm room. This has to have some sort of ramifications on the social development of this generation. The sort of ditached reality which comes with online communications could very well be causing serious social changes on these people who depend on it so greatly.
"There's a madness to my method." -mthed
...because I wouldn't be sitting there trying to get as much done online as possible during the time I was dialled out; I'd just stop and start as I pleased.
Of course, that's because they charge us for local calls over here...
--
Xenu loves you!
If one is really kept on campus by the allure of high bandwidth despite paying four times as much for rent, then colleges clearly are churning out stupid people. Move to the suburbs and buy a T1 line with the rent savings, stupid.
I was talking more about the amounts of them on college servers. If they were reporting this, too then I apologize. It seemed to me that only recently the 'trend' of their widespread use on the college servers has been reported. Thanks for the reply.
I know many ppl on a campus in Holland who all have ATM (=155mbps) from the wall for only $10 a month. Now THAT's what I call high speed internet
===
===
Mac
Most of you posters go to college (i will in august) so I want to know before I choose a college...
Which places have good net access? Do any have weird quirks? keep firewalling/proxies/uptime/speed in mind.
Thanks,
Andrew de los Reyes
--
This has been my first post on slashdot!
Why have Ethernet jacks and cables running all over the place, when you can just put in a few Airport compatible base stations around campus. PC/Mac users can work with them and you can finally be able to watch UCONN beat your team over streaming video. BUAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Yesterday, I walked past the new shrine to last years national championship currently being constructed in the lobby of the UCONN library. Muahahahaahahahaah!
Hell, I junked my cable modem because the admins were jerks..
Living happily now on a 53k dialup, which has been continuously connected for 397 hours now. (Yes, I connected last year, and it's been online ever since.) My system uptime is 17 days 14:44 21s , and that's on a Windows 95b box.
Speaking of which, anyone know what the record is for such things? And I actually use this system several hours a day, it's not like I just booted it and left it alone so I could claim a long uptime.
Honestly, the bandwidth isn't bad. It's slow, but time is something I have lots of. Flag a dozen MP3's and let it run overnight. I'm mostly an IRC addict, and that'd be happy at 2400.
>Your computer sits there and you don't want to use it. You eventually find other things to do.
That's probably the best thing that could happen.
I went through university hooked on the 'net nearly a decade ago, when it was a mere shadow of what it is now and there was no Ethernet to be had outside the lab. (Even the labs were mostly 9600 b/s dumb terminals.) It was a waste of my life... there's a lot I'd give up to get that time back. These toys are more insidiously addictive than any chemical. I'm queasy about what all this is doing to fragile minds, and I'm dead-set against mandatory programs like Acadia's. I'd never allow kids of mine to go to such a place... or at least they'd get no money from me.
2 years ago, I was living in a nice little apartment complex in Lexington, KY. It wasn't too bad, and there were a few of us (5) geeks who all worked at an ISP (which conveniently, wasn't a local call).
The cable system there was a private system, just for the apartment complex, and they were having problems keeping the complex full. So, our suggestion to them was to set up a network for cable modems, or some other high speed access. We backed it up with various articles on how hotels and apartments were able to charge more if they had good connetivity, etc. They ignored us.
Within a year, the main cable company in town had their system up and running. Shortly after that, GTE was up with DSL. (and our complex was 19k feet from the switch...we just barely passed spec for ISDN.)
Needless to say, none of us live there anymore.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I went to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, home of CWRUNet. The entire campus is strung with MM and SM fiber to the desktop. 95% of rooms on campus have faceplates, including all of the dorm rooms. When I got there in '94 we had 10Mb Ethernet for every student on campus. In '97 we moved to 155Mb OC-3 ATM to the Desktop. When I graduated in '98, I went to work for the networking group at CWRU ('cause the GF was in the class below) and the few times I actually had to go out to the dorms to fix problems with PCs, people would actually grumble about bandwidth. Forget the Cable Modem and xDSL. With all of the residential fiber being pulled to A Block Near You(tm) I see at least 10Mb to the home within 5 years. Bandwidth is a commodity, and will soon be treated as such. D-rock
Don't Panic...