Students Seek Widespread Internet Access

Russ Jones writes "As a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we have been struggling with finding ways to provide internet access to our growing off-campus students - currently, students have few to no options other than traditional, expensive, commercial providers. After feeling out large contracts through the University with major providers, it has become clear that they do not want to play ball with a public institution. Regardless, as a student I am still very interested in finding a solution to at least some of the woes. Students at Carolina are required to purchase laptops, many of which are wireless enabled. The University has put a lot of funding into wireless initiatives (but has only looked into using short-distance access points). Are there any long distance alternatives, that could possibly stretch a mile or more in radius? Any ideas on possible alternatives?"

Comments

Students at Tufts University...

[Ieshan]

...are faced with the same problem.

In fact, I know a group of upcoming juniors who decided to not live off campus because of the internet connection - it's god aweful and hideously expensive.

I'm not saying that the school should provide internet access to everyone, but really, some of the cases are ridiculous. Houses that have cabling running underneath and above them should be wired - if the house isn't rented to a Tufts student, charge a small fee for the service that you could work out with the provider of our lines, and if it is, provide free access.

The 'net is Huge at schools now. Everyone's on it, even if computer literacy is still very below "techie". I think the schools really ought to do more to bring the net to their surrounding communities, especially in the case of off campus living.

what my school does

[toast0]

my school has ethernet plugs in the dorms, and in most classrooms, and a lot of the 'public areas' (the student center, library etc), and both a local number and a toll free number (not well documented, but a google search finds it), with ppp support.

I'm moving off campus for the next school year, and if I don't have funding for a cable modem or dsl, using the ppp (which i imagine only runs at 28.8 or so) will be fine. Any downloads I need to do can be done while on campus.

I'm going to do my best to find a home on campus for my 'desktop' with the debian mirror on it though, cause updating the mirror on a modem would be sad :)

I don't know how many students UNC has that would be using dialin lines, but they could start w/ a couple lines and grow as need be... could probably find some used modem racks fairly cheap, especially if 56k isn't important

possible solution

[oo7tushar]

If this is going to be a student initiative a wireless/ethernet combination is a g00d idea. You could have several computers close to campus communicating with a wireless network. These computers would act as the 'middlemen' between the the school and external machines. You'd hook up to these machines through cables and would patch that into another set of machines and so on. Problem is that it's expensive and hard to setup.

Another solution is dialup...but that limits you in speed. If you school is willing to jump through loop holes (regulations is all), you can setup your own DSL: info here. The cost to setup can initially be covered by the school and you can rent the modems to the students. A small fee to use the line can also be included in the rental charge.

Here at the University of Waterloo (www.uwaterloo.ca) the Residences have account quotas so that people don't download movies 24/7. Investigation into how you could do that would also be worthwhile, or just keeping track of how much a specific computer downloads (just to give people warnings).

NCREN or UNC-CH?

[LWolenczak]

Have you talked to NCREN or the university?

A dry copper loop is what? 30 bucks a month... and two dsl pipes are maybe 50-60 bucks on ebay... it would be easy to put up a 2.1 or a 1.5 mbit connection.

And don't say there are not enough ip addresses. UNC-G has a class B.... I'm willing to bet CH has a class b also.

WiFi

[SerialHistorian]

There's a guy who lives on the big island of Hawaii and has managed to set up antennas to run 802.11b to selected areas of the island. I'm trying to find the article, but I can't... it was linked here on /. a number of weeks ago. Also, the city of Yakima, WA is mostly wired with 802.11b, according to the sysadmin at my company, who set the system up. Quite possibly, using a network of directional antennas, a few tall buildings, and inexpensive local access points, you can set up relatively good public 802.11b network that would serve the needs of most students. The best way to do the local access points would be to set up an omnidirectional rebroadcast relay. From previous reading and no practical experience, it seems that this could simply be a cheap box running linux (even a low-end pentium will work...) with a cheap (can be home-made, I think) directional receiver and a omnidirectional antenna (just a regular 802.11b card will work) and some software to glue the two together. Can someone else provide accurate technical details? I'll admit that networking is really my weak area.