Slashdot Mirror
16,000 CWRU Computers Getting Gigabit Ethernet
lowlypeon writes "In a move that makes going back to college more tempting than usual, Case Western is installing fiber connections in 16,000 computers over the next year to give students a 1 gigabit per second Ethernet connection. Administrators aren't sure what anybody needs that kind of bandwidth for yet, but they are curious to see how it gets used."
Won't this really only be useful for the people on campus, even if someone in New York had an equivalent HS connection because of the inherent bottlenecks that exists on the current internet.
~ kjrose
Porn.
Duh.
The network administration folks at CWRU have some very clueful geeks (used bash lately?), but when I left, there were never enough of them. All this fancy new hardware will do the university little good unless they give the people running it enough budget to do a first-rate job.
...what the hell for? I'm the netadmin at Unv and I'm fighting to not run GigE to all my buildings. It simply isn't needed here. I can't imagine running GigE to the desktop. They must have a helluva lot of grant money to waste. The nic cards along aren't cheap. A 3c996 SX card runs about $475 at discount. Are they expecting the users to go out and buy them? That card doesn't have Mac drivers either. I wonder if they expect new Mac users that already have 10/100/1000 to waste a PCI slot for a 1000Base-SX nic. This is just plain weird. I wonder what they connect the building to the campus with... One thing it does do is give the users more than enough umph to DoS most modern processors. It also gives them more than enough umph (if they connect to the campus LAN at say 10GigE to DoS their server farm firewall or worse yet, the actual server. Wanna fill the queue on their I1/I2 border router? Here GigE kids; go have fun.
Well, those are two of the things I know that are in the planning stages. What isn't in this article is that about 10,000 WAPs will be deployed across campus to allow for as much seamless coverage as possible. The WAPs will be capable of holding 2 radios (ostensibly for 802.11b/g and 802.11a). One of the neat ideas being bantered about is perhaps the ability to do VoIP over 802.11... so... cellular service with a twist.
Also, CATV might possible be streamed as well.
There's a lot of new technologies that are going to be pushed and tried out on this network. Some if it will be great, some of it will fail miserably. In any case, it should be interesting and hopefully everyone else will be able to enjoy the fruits of our labors and heartaches once we figure out what works and what doesn't!
pr0n, mp3s, avis, vobs, warez ... the usual
Obviously they will start out using the usual suspects, but if the bandwidth is sufficient, I suspect that these boring old illegimate uses will evolve into more interesting illegimate and legimate uses.
Perhaps sharing entire music collections at once, or developing a good P2P TV sharing system. Maybe high resolution webcams and intra-dorm video conferencing. I think it will be interesting to see the communities and cultural shifts that emerge from this kind of concentrated bandwidth. Mini-cultural shifts from some of the above examples might include 'Dorm TV', with a floor or individual rescheduling (and retransmitting) distributely stored TV programs to fit in with classes, along with some ripped movies and home-made messages thrown into the mix. Also, in an age of reality shows, access to higher resolution web-cams/video conferencing might generate totally different perspectives on privacy, especially within an enviroment where students are already likely to share rooms, showers, and eating areas. Like those first exposed to e-mail and the web, these students will surely have different attitudes and higher expectations when they move out and begin work.
Total speculation on my part, but high bandwidth should take us well beyond mp3's and warez, making this a very interesting experiment indeed. The big question will be how this use is monitored (traffic or anecdotal) and if the university/provider will step in prematurely to stop illegal or suspect use, since so much of the ultimately interesting (and even legimate uses) are likely to sprout from initial hacks for illegimate use.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
Want to use a VPN so you can work from home easily? Legal.
Want to watch streaming concerts and keynotes of big events? Maybe view videos of your classes? Legal.
Want to have a decent ping on game servers? Legal.
Want to download the latest 200MB game demo in a matter of minutes? Legal.
Want to try videoconferencing with your loved ones to save phone bills? Legal.
If you can't think of legal uses for broadband, then maybe you're one of those people that's content to stick with a dial-up modem.
On Case's campus for the past several years they have had a system set up for freshman Chemistry review sessions (I'm sure it is used for other classes as well). The prof can broadcast the review live to the entire campus and students can call in and ask questions. From experience, I have found this useful in that (1) it saves me the trouble of hiking across campus to Schmitt lecture hall, but more importantly (2) if I have other obligations at the same time the review is going on, I can just record the review and watch it when I find time.
Having the new technology so the "teacher can control lights, sound system and link to the web" will allow more professors to do the same. (Only one TV channel is currently used, so if it is broadcast over the internet, the number of classes you can broadcast simultaneously now increases... well, technically not infinitely, but you get the picture.) Being connected will also allow students to possibly send the prof diagrams, code-snippets, etc... which may improve the quality of the sessions as well.
("We... have ways... of finding out... who.. who... who you are....")
Karma: NaN
I believe one of the design goals here is to also prevent the need to upgrade the network every 4 years. With 100 Mbps... chances are we will have to upgrade again. The more upgrades, the more chances for problems and the more disruption for users. Doing it less often will help to extend the investment. These issues have been argued ad nauseum on campus. There are certainly some downsides that few can argue against. However, I believe the benefits will far outweigh the potential downside issues.
How it will be used. Get real use your brain and think what it was like being 19 and away from home and without a girlfriend cuz your a geek.
"You lucky, lucky bastards!"
Sorry to be off-topic, but I think you missed something.
The ability to share a playlist does not MP3-swapping make. You can send someone else a list of songs and it will find them on the other person's computer.
Also, you've obviously never used an iPod. Apple set it up so iTunes allows you to copy music to the iPod, not from it. Sure, you can use it as a portable hard drive, but condemming the iPod as against the DMCA for that is like saying Sharpie's should be illegal becauce they can defeat CD copy protection. Let's ban all forms of transportable media while we're at it.
The iPod's protection can be broken with various bits of software, but again, condemning the iPod for this would be like condemning makers of CDs because their copy protection can be broken.
Sorry to go off, but Apple is doing far more to keep music both accessible and legal than anyone else I've seen in some time. Even the "Rip. Mix. Burn." campaign was in keeping with that. You must have the CD to rip it. Apple isn't willing to go to the opressive extremes that Microsoft is with Palladium, but they are trying to keep people honest.
Maybe Apple just believes that people can be good, and Microsoft (and most everyone else) has forgetten that.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
If CWRU is installing the wireless, they'll have at least some semblence of security on it. If universities are hunting down rogue wireless, for reasons other than just clueless control-freakness, it's because they're (legitimately) concerned about uncontrolled access as a security risk. Of course, security problems are much different for academia than for businesses - here in the business world, the classic security threat is some college kid hacking into your network. But if you're *running* a university network, all those threats are already *inside* your firewall - and they're your customers....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks