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Fiber To The Dorm Room
alertpopes writes "Looking for a great education AND a dedicated personal fiber internet connection in your dorm room? Students enrolling at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH get both! Just don't bring any 10/100 equiptment - it's gigabit only around here. All students have access to over 16,000 fiber ports throughout the university plus 802.11g campus-wide! Registered students must buy a Netgear GC102 Gigabit Ethernet Media Converter through the University eStore for a mere $216.50 to connect to the service, but isn't it worth it? CWRU recommends the purchase of either a Dell or Apple for incoming students to meet networking requirements. The University was voted the 'Most wired Campus' by Yahoo! Internet Life magazine in 1999."
Sounds like most over-wired. I would hope they could allow students to connect for free with all they saved by running fiber only and no ethernet. They should have budgeted in for students to get all they need to connect though. I'd be annoyed if I had to buy more equipment to connect my machines there, only to accomodate bandwidth I'll never realistically utilize.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
...how fast the retrans will be when they hit the choke point!
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
I know that we've got CD-bootable Knoppix out there, but with networks like this, wouldn't it pay to have a network-bootable version of Linux floating around out there? I mean, every PC made today has a network boot option. It would be nice to see someone make use of it, since Microsoft never will.
For things like repair and security, this would be great. I can see the day when spyware makes the average PC so insecure that online banking and other institutions *require* users to boot from a secured distro. Having it available on the network would just make it that much easier. In a few years, it will be trivial for a home router to hold the image.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Get one of these babies SK 9844.
Offloads damn near everything, vlans, checksums etc. Doesn't do IPSEC, but then if you're spending about 700 on a NIC you'd get a separate crypto accelerator for that.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
I think it's time to go back to grad school. and now i know where. wonder what grad degrees they have? oh well, that is just a little detail.
Evolution or ID?
"Now, I'd really hate for you
computer jocks to feel left
out,
Because we all talk different
languages,
Don't we?"
Any thought you've ever had has already be
As copper ethernet is nearing its end, fiber only seems like the only other logical way to go for networking. As more and more people start switching to fiber, the more the price gets driven down. If we have large universities like these all switching to fiber (and i mean for thousands of people) the better the price looks for normal consumers! I think it's a good move on their part, even though they need to pay a little hefty price for the card. I believe it's worth it!
this has been known about CWRU since every dorm room had 10Mb to the rooms back in the very early 90s and before. This is almost entirely due to the Cleveland Freenet/CWRUNet, which many might remember as the first and biggest internet accessible BBS that spawn a series of other Freenets, including Cincinnati and Detroit area ones.
George Washington Univ. had fiber to every room when my friends sister went there in 1999. You got a media converter to borrow for the year for free. Sounds like a better deal than CWU...
Whose HD can constantly suck up more than a 100 MB pipe? (Don't quote me some Sandra benchmark off a gamerz site, here) And if 100 people in a dorm are all "on fiber" and the dorm has "fiber" to the campus core router, which has "fiber" somewhere else, at what point does the bandwidth get divided down below 100 MBit anyway? You're not going to get more than that, why run expensive fiber when you can run cheapo Cat 5, and put the phones on the unused pairs as well? The math doesn't work here.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Why dell, after the problems I had with the h^hdell laptop and the hostility I got form the tech "support" for the first year when the hard drive was starting to go bad they just hung up on me, then after the year was up they just came back with your warenty is up we can not help you. Well I say fuck dell.
Just imagine the speeds they can share their mp3 collection at. I bet they are the next top target of the RIAA
Evolution or ID?
CWRU used to have ATM to each dorm....years ago...in fact, it was over 5 years ago that they had it
You know, I didn't see any problem with this submission until I read this at the end. There is absolutely no reason this should have been included in the press relea...errrr....story submission.
Any brand of machine meeting the min. specs would do quite well, in fact I'm sure you could go a bit below them on a home built machine and get by fine.
A note to all the PR people who submit things to slashdot. If you make things as blatantly obvious as this, we WILL notice, and we WILL make certain to point it out to fellow readers (or at least I will).
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Ridiculous overkill. How about putting the money towards lowering sky high tuition costs?
Self awareness - try it!
This makes me wonder what the fastest connection available to normal houses is. I have an 8 Mbit ADSL connection. I've seen 16 Mbit, but it requires 2 telephone wire pairs. Anyone else got more?
1. Why on earth fiber? The advantage of fiber is that it works over long distances (standard copper ethernet cables can only go for about 200m I believe). It's great for connecting seperate sites. It's lousy for connecting dorm rooms. They should have had fiber coming into the halls, into a router, with gigabit switches serving the rooms. Suddenly, as long as you have RJ-45 ethernet, you can connect.
2. How much actual bandwidth is there. In particular, if you divide their bandwidth to the Internet, by the number of students, I bet you get a lot less than gigabit. Even taking into account that only a fraction of them will be online at any one time, I'd be suprised if this is actually much faster than most universities with a network in the halls.
With that kind of pipe, you could enroll in school, get a dorm room and start your own ISP. That would pay for college and recoup that $250 for the card. Or even more for the router and such.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Those specs for minimum requirements are more like "according to our crtact with Dell/Apple..." I think you'd be fine without a flat panel monitor, screaming processor, and the 3-year warranty. As a college student, I'm not made of money, as I'm sure the students at this school aren't either. There is no reason a much less powerful can't connect to their system, maybe I'd be happy with a simple 20GB HDD instead of having 80GB to stash my pirated movies/music...
I don't see the necessity for most of this stuff...
;)
512MB of RAM is understandable, 1GB is not necessary. College students should be doing research and writing papers. IE/Moz/etc and a word processor do not require that much RAM.
A flat panel display is nice but not required. If they are going to ask for it why not just require a 19" LCD by Dell?
HD sizes were a bit much... Shouldn't they limit them to 3GB or less so that they can't be downloading movies and music quite as much?
The wireless is nice and I won't comment on that
Gigabit ethernet is nice but unnecessary. The Internet is only so fast. The campus network being blazing fast will only encourage file trading and MPAA/RIAA violations internally.
I know this would be the first problem that came to mind for me. How will people be forced to deal with the problem that there's probably not a single laptop out there that has fiber gigabit in it? Of course, my Powerbook has gigabit copper on it, as does my recently upgraded motherboard. So there're two gigabit units that wouldn't be able to work here. There's a time and place where backwards compatibility has to be maintained, and most certainly a time to ditch it. It seems to me that we're about a decade away from fiber being the most efficient and effective way to push gigabit to the dorm room.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
This is old news. What do you want, a cookie?
Thanks to you, alertpopes, expect all the RIT people to come out of the woodwork and clamor for themselves to be noticed, because they're a tech school too. Just what we unassuming Case people needed...way to go.
While Case does have a lot going for it in this regard, please disregard that Yahoo story; Yahoo's 'research' into that reward was done by distributing surveys to the various institutions, and it's widely known that the VP in charge of ITS at the time 'won' CWRU that rank by lying through his teeth. Here's a reference, look near the bottom: http://www.onecleveland.org/Observer%204-9-04.htm.
shouldn't all you need be a fiber gigabit NIC and the proper fiber SC or ST (depending on what they use) patch cable?
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
(For those who're about to point out that 3 houres minus 5 minutes equals 2h 55 minutes: I assume 5 minutes to clean up. I mean, you do wash your hands afterwarts, right?)
How long before someone at the RIAA connects the dots and realizes that Case Western Reserve University's high-bandwidth intranet is a target rich environment for subpoenas and potential lawsuits against file-sharers allegedly infringing on their members' copyrights?
It's not like they require the song sharing to take place over the internet in order to go after people...
CWRU has had its fiber network since the 1980's or early 90's at the latest. I imagine they've probably gone through some expansion and upgrading in the intervening years, but back when I was looking at colleges this was one of the features they touted highly during the campus tour.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
And no one will ever need more than 640k.
Evolution or ID?
The fiber gig network isn't good for anything but downloading porn from the guy down the hall. For awhile now Case has paid for a 45 mbit outbound connection, but the provider never actually enforced the cap. They started enforcing it towards the end of the spring semester and everything slowed to a crawl. Gig is great, but before I left campus for summer I never got more than a few kbit for most downloads.
obligatory text added to defeat lameness filter.
CWRU has had fiber to every dorm room on campus since 1988 (yes, 16 years ago).
I was a student there when they installed it. Most of the academic building where wired in 1987, dorms in 1988 (at least 6 pair to every room) and off campus housing (e.g Fraternities and Sororities) in 1989 and 1990.
In 1988, the campus bookstore would loan you an ethernet card and a fiber transceiver (I believe at that time it was 10Mb/s, a precursor to the 10BaseFL standard).
The Economics of Website Security
What exactly CAN they do with it? Yeah, they are gonna get unbelievable bandwidth inside, but not many students do much other than surf the web.
The internet connection is going to be the choke point. They probably have an OC3, just like Miami, UC, and my school, Shawnee State.
The only thing I see this as useful for is internal transmissions to do things like reghost computers at boot. But they won't be doing those in students dorms.
the 802.11g though, is awsome. I would give my left nut to have that all over campus here.
they spent so much money on the fibre all the servers are hand me down Sinclair ZX81's.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Couple of links:
100 Most Wired, 1999
100 Most Wired, 2000 (Case Western drops off the list)
The University of Delaware moved up to #2... then their network was brought to its knees due to file sharing (presumably it fell off the list in 2001).
What really surprises me is that "traditional" tech universities don't hold the top spots.
Disclaimer: UD alumn
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
I can't believe the negative responses to this. In 10 years they will need every last bit of the bandwidth of Fiber (Voice/Video/Teleportation)When everyone is saying "WHY?", we should be saying "WHY NOT?".
greetings from bandwidth-uni: utwente.nl
Is there any real reason to put fiber all the way to the dorm room? The main advantage of fiber over copper is that it can run MUCH longer distances, but it is more expensive and difficult to work with. Why not just run the fiber b/w buildings and then put copper gigabit switches in the buildings so students can use commodity gigabit ethernet adapters? My guess is that they were so far ahead of the curve(CWRU has always been overwired) that they started the upgrade to all fiber before copper gigabit was a viable option and are now stuck with all the extra fiber going to the dorm rooms, causing the students to have to make extra purchases to interface with the less common fiber .
Thoughts on tech, Software Engineering, and stuff
Because the school is in Ohio they needed some new attraction. What other reason is there to go to Ohio for?
Evolution or ID?
I went to CWRU from 95 - 00. The fiber to the dorm room system has been in place since the early 90's. First it ran on 10Mbit cards, then, while I was there they decided not to move to 100Mbit ethernet but rather to move to 155Mbit ATM. The ATM trasition was a disaster. It was hugely expensive to use the Fore systems cards (at $1500 a pop). Not only that, Fore had never done a deployment on that scale before. One of my friends who worked for network services told me that Fore had never tested their system on a network larger then 100 computers before it was deployed on our campus. The students who moved over to the ATM system immediately suffered from daily network outages. The Network services people were loading new drivers from Fore into the switches on a weekly basis trying to stabilize the system. All that money only to tear it all out again to upgrade to GigE. Yes it is a waste of money.
We've had fiber to the desktop since 1989!
As for that Yahoo award? Ray Neff, former IT director at CWRU (but now cursing Berkeley with his presence) was responsible for bringing ATM to the desktop in the mid-late '90s, which was widely regarded as a disaster. The Yahoo's most wired campus award? Well, the results of that were based solely on a survey submitted to Yahoo by each campus's IT director. Many of the answers that CWRU submitted on that survey were exaggerations, while others were simply untrue. Neff left the university around the same time that a University audit detected about half a million dollars in misplaced department funds, and while no guilt was ever placed or admitted, I'll let you connect the dots.
Since those "glory years", however, we've ditched ATM on the desktop, and better yet, we no longer have the world's largest flat-topology IP network (back in the day, a few people playing unpatched Doom 1 could bring the network to its knees due to the use of broadcast packets). Instead, we have gigabit over fiber, and Intel has ranked us the 4th most unwired campus as well.
Still, this is hardly *news* to anyone. It's been like this here for a long time.
My school, as well as where I work both use 10Mbps connections.
/.?
Due to uplink, and most people only using the internet... no advantage for anything faster. I'll perhaps on the internal servers use up to 8Mbps.
But are they really going to use all that bandwidth? Is there 1000Mbps connectivity to the outside world? Do they have a reason for it internally?
Or is it just to make
I'm seriously curious.
I could see a physics, or comp sci dept. upgrading it's labs to Gigabit, internally. But campus wide? That strikes me as just a media stunt to sound like a good comp sci. school.
Gigabit Hotmail/and AIM? Sounds a bit excessive.
I'd bet the average connection from a dorm is under 3Mbps.
Hopefully, I can try and clarify some things before a lot of bright students decide to attend college at CWRU. I am a former student of CWRU, and, to be honest, I wish I wasn't. The Comp-Sci/Engineering school sucks and many of the professors could care less about teaching and take great pride in degrading their students. I've had a math professor berate a friend of mine and constantly call him stupid... yes, the professor was dead serious when he said it and the student almost committed suicide. I had another friend, with a 1600 SAT fail out because he hated the school and the professors there.
The administration had lied to me personally about transfer credit and tuition related policies and made promises I should have gotten in writing because they failed to keep them. Hell, according to friend I had in the department, the comp-sci program was in jeopardy of losing its accreditation a few years ago. Finally, don't plan on getting sick, being forced to take a semester off for surgery, and having your ~$20-30k tuition reimbursed. A friend had to leave school in order to have surgery done and they failed to reimburse her... even after promising that they would.
CWRU has a habit of using their network to lure bright students in. For the Yahoo! ratings, the university lied about the network hardware and other computer programs in place and essentially ended up raising tuition to cover their tracks. I could write an entire book about my problems and troubles at CWRU. Still, most would likely view me as a troll or someone who is bitter at the university for some reason. So I guess I've said all I can.
Trust me, if you want a quality education at a school where professors and administration care, avoid Case Western Reserve University at all costs. If you don't believe me and attend the school anyway, just remember that you were warned.
How do you innovate? You give fiber connections to a bunch of college kids with nothing better to do than to play with it in their spare time.
Now they probably really did this because they got a good deal on it, and because it is a good investment in the future. It might be overkill today, but it might lead to innovations. It is kind of like the monkeys/typewriters/Shakespeare thing.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
A flat panel LCD saves a huge amount of room when compared to a CRT display. An important issue for people being housed in tiny (that's redundant) dorm rooms. Plus, they save on energy costs.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I went to Case (they changed their name from CWRU) back in '91 and provided all the hardware for free back then. It was great for playing 8 player Warcraft 2. The best part was it was right as MP3s got started and so the files were going back and forth like crazy. Not to mention things like hotline, AOL hacking, etc. They even had their Xerox machines networked and we used to dump our systems to the internal copier's hard drives to do backups.
As I was on my way out, they had upgraded everyone to ATM@the desk. It blew at first, but after a couple driver changes, it was like having your own pipe.
Link to stats
I worked campus tech support at Virginia Tech. VT's engineering school recommended IBM machines (and back then this was reasonable) and there was a very good reason for it: we had an IBM shop on-site. You could get SAME DAY repair on your IBM if anything went wrong. You just carted it down to the EE shop, filled out a form and check back that afternoon - usually it was fixed.
Same for the math department - they used Apples and had an apple shop in the lab. If something broke in the lab, I just unplugged it and carted it upstairs. No shipping, no carriers to damage the equipment further, no waiting. Just leave it by the door with a sticky note.
Oh - and bulk discounts are always nice for the students. Pre-order your machine and save $$$!
For the record, though, I didn't buy an IBM when I enrolled. I build my own. :)
Yes, because before they couldnt download Gain, Gator, and Bonzai Buddy fast enough. "Just wait til you see the blazingly fast speeds of Kazaa and porn downloads."
16,000 CWRU Computers Getting Gigabit Ethernet
A big waste of money?
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Number one: yes, they *recommend* Dell or Apple. Why not? It's not a requirement, and for folks who don't care what they have, it's advice that'll help them get better support from the college help desk.
Number two: yes, $200+ for the adapter is pricey. But split it with your roommate and it becomes $100. Sell it (jointly) to the next sucker in your room, and you only spend maybe $20 each on it. Or do what I'd do: screw wired and go with 802.11g, which is campus wide anyway. On those few occasions you're d'ling a distro or whatever, go down to the computer labs and jack into their ethernet, or borrow an extra port on a friend's adapter.
Sometimes I make initial odd interpretations like that, such as when this guy remarked that some basketball player grew an extra foot in a year. So I said, in all seriousness, "Really? Where'd he grow it?"
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
To add to the problem, most commodity PCs can't handle gigabit anyway. The garden-variety PCI implementation tops out at about 50 MB/s, so you aren't even getting everything you're paying for unless you pay for a system with PCI-X or better.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
I mean, you do wash your hands afterwards, right?
No.
If you look at hardware and labor costs, gigabit Ethernet is cost-effective for new installations. Installing 100base-t is not going to save much money on the hardware and it will be obsolete at an earlier date. Fiber has higher termination costs but it should have a longer useful lifetime than twisted-pair.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
i live maybe 45 minutes from Case and have been plannin to go there for a few years now... I just cant wait to go there... Biomedical Engineering I HATE HIGH SCHOOL
If the RIAA had a clue, they would realize that college students are going to have a big say in this country someday. If they plan to exist and operate effectively for the next 100 years, they're going to stop going after the college crowd.
I don't think they thought this through. From the link:
If your computer has a 10/100/1000 Ethernet connection, or if it says "Gigabit Ethernet connection included" in the specs, you've got the right system for our network.
But, further down:
Our network uses fiber optics connections in your residence hall.
So, the fact that I have a 10/100/1000 copper connection means that I can't connect to their network?
Why did they not use copper gigabit for the in room connections, so that (a) EVERY computer from Dell, Apple, etc, labeled "10/100/1000" would be usable without additional hardware, (b) copper gigabit PCI cards are a hell of a lot less expensive than optical fiber cards, and (c) you can still support 10/100Mbit connections for those students (all 99.9% of them) who have no use for gigabit?
- Tony
Well, I went to Case from 94-98 and worked in the network engineering group in 99. The fiber was put in a long time ago. It wasn't an upgrade, it was just how they wired everything. Every dorm room has two faceplates. Each faceplate has 2 SM fiber pairs, 2 MM fiber pairs, 1 Coax and 1 Cat3 cable for phone. It's unfortunate that they didn't install Cat5, but that's the way it is. Retrofitting with Cat5 was going to be a tremendous cost, so we just avoided doing it.
Derek
Don't Panic...
Old news, but a comment on how/why. It was explained to me (I forget by whom) that the reason CWRU has what seems like overkill is that this was Federally funded. There was a large pot of money, and whatever CWRU did NOT spend, went to the next school in line, so there was no incentive for CWRU NOT to put in a gold-plate network. I don't think I was told where the $$ came from, FCC taxes or what.
A friend of the family was starting there in fall of 1994 or so, & she asked for computer advice from me, & when I asked about networking, she found out & told me that CWRU would *lend* them a fiber NIC which she would only have to pay for if she did not return it, or maybe she paid a deposit which was refunded when the fiber NIC was returned.
It is, if you can see 3 hours worth of porn in under 5 minutes. That does leave you another 2h50 minutes of extra time to study.
Gigabit ethernet != time compressor. Three hours is still three hours. Unless the network hardware they're selling is a flux capacitor, three hours of porn will still take you three hours to watch. And since when is 100Mbit/s not fast enough to stream high quality video anyway?
From their Computer Recommendations 2004, they say a 2.8ghz CPU is minimum (even though they'll probably say a 2.8ghz Celeron is fine even though it's slower than a ~2.4ghz anything else)? And 64MB of video ram (ignoring the fact that built on cards have no specific ammount of video ram and are fine)? SoundBlaster sound card (even though built on sound is perfectly fine)? Oh, and "Additionally, laptops running windows should use the Centrino processor" (even though Centrino is NOT a CPU, but a marketing name for the Pentium-M CPU with specific wireless)?
Overal I must say their recomendations are full of shit. (and fiber to the desktop is just stupidly expensive and waiting to break, gig over fiber works great).
Fiber ethernet nstalled in 1986.
Ever thought the research may require that RAM, those image matrices have to be stored somewhere! Sometimes its unavoidable.
(After 'Windows' takes its share, of course)
I just graduated from Case and just recently spoke with the Cisco Rep that handeled the conversion of Case's network from ATM to Gigabit Ethernet. It would have been cheaper to rerun copper to all ports and buy copper Cisco switches and routers instead of the millions they spent on fiber switches and routers but the person who made the decision to go to fiber so long ago didnt want it to look like he made bad decision. In the long run it will probably work for the best anyway but an interesting fact none the less.
Well, because the cable itself is only a small part of the cost. A much larger part of that cost is actually running the cable; lifting up floors, installing cable trays, routing cables etc. It's time consuming and expensive.
With fiber, you should only ever have to do it *once*. Then you simply upgrade the transmit/receive equipment at either end of the cable. With copper cable, you have to continually replace the wires themselves. CAT3, CAT5, CAT5e, CAT6 how many times do you want to re-run cables all over the place as bandwidth requirements increase?
The capital cost of fiber is more expensive in the short run but it saves money in the long run.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Yes, it's CASE now, not CWRU. That name change came after a $1 million case study to figure out that people would remember CASE easier than CWRU... that's where our tuition goes. =(
The RIAA did cut into CASE a while back (2-3 years ago I think) and still do random anonymous checks on our network. I think when we got slammed we became the 4th largest distributor of pirated media in the world. Again, our tuition at work.
Two words... Darth SCSI. Those that go here know about the Gigapr0n.
Our tuition keeps rising probably because people need more stuff. People are always fascinated with having more stuff... like a diner that took a full year extra to get built, taking out half of our basketball courts in the process.
Yep, it is home to the Peter B. Lewis building... yeah, the one that looks like I shredded a soda can and placed it on the roof of a building. Huge waste of time, and it was clear that the engineer(s) responsible didn't factor in slabs of ice and snow falling off the roof hitting students as they enter or exit the building.
BME will shatter your soul. Trust me. When I first came here 3 years ago, I knew 25 people in the BME department (all freshman)... now there are only 2 left of those 25.
Am I the only one missing yahoo internet live mag?
Anyone have a good alternative, no wired is different..
but in 1999, they had 155 mbit atm fiber to the desktop, not gigabit.
/16 network left.
they also had the largest, noisiest, flat topology
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
"It's unfortunate that they didn't install Cat5"
Sounds to me like someone had a fair bit of foresight.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
These requirements for system spec read like an advertisement for PCs that you see in the local paper, just missing the line with the price.
If they are just doing word processing/games/filesharing/web browsing, why do they need this? I know Moore's law obsolete's old processors... but some people run operating systems that dont require 50% of the CPU time, and another 25% for all the spyware!
And the fact that they have their own e-store, where you also have to purchase the NIC makes this sound like someone is getting commission for all those Dells and Apples.
You cant make anything foolproof, they'll only invent better fools.
I don't suppose they're making money recommending these two specific brands are they?
Case EDU Computer Store>
Now what exactly do they think students are going to download with this kind of connection other than movies and music? The engineering and science students who might have lots of data prob need their lab computers since it has all the needed software on it. My argument is, the bandwitdh will not help much in doing their assignments.
The cost of running fiber is only slightly more then running copper, as most of the cost is labour not materials. The expensive part of fiber is the media converters and switches. I suspect that the university ran fiber because they will be able to upgrade to 10Gigabit for only the cost of new switches. It should save money in the long term.
I suspect they did think it through.
Perhaps they'd rather not spend money repeatedly re-wiring the LAN as bandwidth requirements increase. After all, it's you who wants to connect to the network, why shouldn't you pay for it.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
...for me to go back to school :)
There are no tiger attacks in my area and it's all because this rock I'm holding keeps the tigers away.
But never mind. The only current use I can see for all this bandwidth is music and movie sharing. I presume CWR had this in mind when they built-out.
Oh, one small thing: fiber is fragile. The MT or MJ connectors are only good for so many (~50) cycles and are a bitch to replace. RJ45s are good for more and much easier to repunch when worn out.
That arguement didnt help the pot smokers of the 1960s did it?
Regardless of what you may think of Cleveland, there are several particularly bright spots about the CWRU campus. To name a few:
* Presti's Donut shop, near the corner of Murray Hill and Mayfield. Go after midnight, when you're done studying, and the donuts for the next day are coming out. Used to be at 1:15AM you get get fresh, HOT cinnamon rolls. (may still be true, don't know)
* Severance Hall, home of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, simply one of the best in the world.
* the art museum, don't remember the exact name, right next door to Severance Hall.
and this is all walking distance from the Case campus.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I work and am a student at Case Western, and the gigabit fiber isn't all it's cracked up to be. Mostly because our outgoing connection is capped around 80mb by Oarnet (granted, we do have i2, which rarely gets utilized). I'd just like to point out that we've had speeds described as "worse than dial up" going out while pulling 21 meg/sec on the LAN. Until we actually get a real outgoing connection, the fiber is only good for transfering pictures you've taken in the hallways while waiting for your downloads to finish in prime time.
That place is a fucking joke, fiber to the desktop, yeah -- but then they use cheapie $180 transceivers to convert it right back to copper.
CWRU is a clusterfuck with a lot of money to spend, nothing more
back in my day, we had to offer up our first born child, one appendage, and sign contracts in blood just to get a dial up account and access to the campus modem pool. A bank of 1200 and 2400 baud modems!
And our packets had to travel uphill, both ways, in the snow!
Hrmmm, this is rather nice tho. Even with the mentioned fragility of fiber (which I know all too well, having destroyed several fiber cables by pinching them in rack doors, raised floor tiles, etc..), it is still a neat idea.
Wonder if the RIAA and MPAA will insist on sniffers and monitoring on thier network, because we all know that the only thing anyone needs a gigabit connection for is to pirate movies and hack other peoples computers and bank accounts!
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
Because the school is in Ohio they needed some new attraction. What other reason is there to go to Ohio for?
I'll bite. There are plenty of reasons to go to Ohio. I'm from Cleveland so I know the attractions there better but Cincinatti and Columbus are pretty fun cities too. In no particular order and just off the top of my head:
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Cedar Point (most roller coasters in the world)
Cleveland Indians/Browns/Cavaliers
Cincinatti Reds/Bengals
Columbus Crew/Ohio State Buckeyes
Toledo Mudhens
(I know, sports are lost on this crowd)
Origins International Game Expo
Cleveland Orchestra (among the best in the world)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Cleveland Museum of Natural History
(fyi, the orchestra and museums are all within walking distance of CWRU's campus)
Playhouse Square Center (second largest performing arts center in the US)
Great Lakes Science Center
Wineries along the south shore of Lake Erie
Boating/Fishing/Watersports on Lake Erie
Wright-Patterson Airforce Base
Birthplace museums for the Wright Bros, Edison and 6 presidents (for history buffs)
Several excellent colleges, including CWRU
The Cleveland Clinic (premier heart medicine hospital in the world. Hope you don't have to go for this though...)
Metroparks (a ring of public parks surrounding many of the major cities, including Cleveland and Toledo)
And there's plenty more. Cleveland in particular has really turned around in the last 25 years. It can be a pretty fun town to visit these days. If you've done all the stuff I list above and still think Ohio is boring, then we clearly have different definitions of entertainment.
They should have highhlighted that you need to buy the NetGear media converter. We should all be amazed that fiber equipment is available for a little over $200 but that looms large in a student's budget.
Why use fiber? They should have used gig copper. I can think of a thousand reasons not to do this, but kinking the connector cable is Numero Uno. There must be a very happy cable vendor nearby.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
They could have wired Cat5 instead of Cat3 and used the extra pairs for the phone just as easily.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
They've capped our connection to the outside world at 45 mbps for the whole damn campus, so transfers outside of our local network are slower than that from most cable providers.
Curses. I'm using Mozilla and Adblock to get rid of all these ridiculous aimed-at-the-bottom-percentile advertisements and pop-ups, and now the ads start infiltrating the news websites!
Chaps, before publishing something *this* obviously written by an PR department, perhaps you'd at least consider rewriting it.
I mean, the whole thing looks like you copied it straight off a billboard.
(Yes, here in Germany universities don't advertise themselves. That's because they're free).
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
Fiber beats copper on a couple of points.
For instance, the length of the cable can be much longer (kilometers instead of meters) and it's far more reliable when it comes to actual speeds. Copper does have the disadvantage of signal distortion which is far less a problem with fiber.
The possible uses for such cabling could be far more then just downloading. Webcasts of lectures come to mind and for the students it would be much more fun to be able to collaborate on projects using the network. I doubt that they just used fiber with internet usage in mind.
Several posts allready mentioned the fact that fiber is being used for over a decade now. Why go and dig to put ethernet in the ground when you allready have fiber laying there?
My Highschool had an amazingly good computer / network setup.
We had two giant switch racks on either end of the building connected to eachother via fiber. There were at least 4 100Mb wall sockets in each room, and most had 10+. We had three computer labs (two were macintosh labs with a wide variety of different macs available) and the CAD-lab was PC. Every student had server space from the beefy (I don't remember the exact specs though) Mac server in the main lab room.
The biggest problem was the connection to the outside world. It was a donated ISDN line from the local phone company, and didn't get very good speeds.
BTW, this was all in a school of 300 people total spanning grades 7-12.
br -Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
One thing the article doesn't mention is that, while the LAN is fast as hell, the line outside sucks. Split between Case, and the Cleveland art and music universities is a 45mbit line. That's right. It used to not be so bad when we used 10x this much and they didn't notice, but the ISP cracked down on bandwidth abuse this past semester and at times the line outside was slower than a 56k!
Why not just run the fiber b/w buildings and then put copper gigabit switches in the buildings so students can use commodity gigabit ethernet adapters?
That's the way it is at my school. Every dorm room, office, lab, and library has 1000/100/10 base T at every port, and the buildings are all connected to the university's Internet-2 gateway via fiber.
This is the way it's been for the past 4 years, and my school is just the state university of a small deep-southern state. I bought a $15 ethernet card and get gigabit access to internet2...no complaints from me.
No, actually the fiber infrastructure went in before CAT-3 was even a standard. New buildings and those getting rewired for other reasons are getting fiber AND CAT-6, but they just couldn't justify the cost of replacing the existing infrastructure. It's served us well for 15 years.
/. when we went all gig, and we made /. when we announced free wireless through our 1600 acceess points on campus. But there's nothing new to report now.
Oh, and in buildings new enough to have a copper network infrastructure as well, the ethernet ports are connected to 10/100/1000 switches, so you can plug in whatever type of RJ-45 ethernet you like.
I don't know why this is news, though. We made
I mean, you do wash your hands afterwarts, right?
You left a little freudian slip in there...
When I left the dorms in 90 to move up the hill to the Heights, they put the fiber in over the summer....rat bastards.
korc
What about laptops? It was my understanding that PCMCIA cards for GB connections were unavailable. Many new students show up with laptops for the portability.
OK, let me try to explain how this campus works to those who assume that Case just dumped tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on a fiber network in recent years.
r s/CWRUnet_Timeline.html
The real answer is, we've had this fiber network in place since the late 1980s. That's right. So to those who are talking about "why not just run cat6?". Well, let me tell you, that wasn't exactly even around back then. Here's a brief (and somewhat dated) timeline of how this campus network was built: http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/tour/Tours/CWRUnet_Tou
I know this because I was a student here and now a technical and facilities manager and have been on the campus for about a decade.
Also, gig fiber to the desktop *is* nice. Try pulling down a complete set of ISOs (MSDNAA, BSD, Linux, whatever). The more the better, in my opinion. The equipment really isn't that expensive.
Yes, one of our limiting factors is that currently we are uplinked at an oc-3 with only about 45 megabits partitioned off for commodity internet usage. The rest is devoted to Internet2 traffic. However, as I understand it, this will change and in the near future we will have a full gigabit uplink to our provider (maybe even more, it's been awhile).
In regards to the recommendations made, no, I don't think they were really necessary. Who outside of this school really cares anyway? However, that said, the University does get a really nice discount on some Dell products. Enough to make it worth it for most students (whom would probably buy Dell anyway based upon current market share).
So there you have it. Quit bitching about the use of fiber. I know this won't stop the arguing, but might as well not fight a decision that was made 15 YEARS AGO. Oh, and by the way, kind of nice to know that that same infrastructure has WORKED for that entire 15 years without need to repull copper and likely will continue to work for many more decades to come. A low long-term TCO is kind of a nice thing you know.
Finally, my opinions do not necessarily reflect the official opinions of my employe, Case Western Reserve University and I speak in no official public relations capacity... I simply speak as an alumnus and current employee.
I didn't RTFA (hey, this is slashdot :-)), but maybe constructing that network has been largely funded by corporations who are now going to make a big buck selling the necessary equipment to students?
I don't want 90VAC pulses right next to my data.
Case needs that kind of bandwidth for porn. There's no real eye candy whatsoever
Depends what state. In the PRC (peoples republic of California) I have cop freind who won't do the paper work on anything less than an ounce, because most DA's won't do anything with it. Now that the medical pot law is in effect, its easier for cops just to turn a blind eye to the whole mess.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
I made a statement, not an argument. If that's how they want to go about business, fine with me.
Q: Why did they use fiber instead of coper cables?
A: Because they are using the fiber optic cables they installed into the dorm rooms in the early ninties. I'm not sure of the exact year, but I believe that the wiring was completed in 1992 or 1993. I started at Case in 1994 and every dorm room had a faceplate with phone, cable, and multimode and singlemode fiber optic. The multimode fiber was used for the network connection. Even back then, my brand spanking new PowerMac 7100/66, which had a built-in AAUI Ethernet port, required an AAUI to AUI adapter and then an AUI to 10-baseFL converter to hook to the wall.
The reason Case can go to gigabit in the first place is that they don't have to replace the Cat 3 cable that they probably would have installed back then. Unfortunately, the bet did not pay of in the sense that copper is still the standard, and fiber optic NICs are very expensive. It did pay off in the sense that they can switch to Gigabit for the cost of expensive NICs, rather than the cost of having to lay new cable.
Oh, and that whole "Most Wired Campus" thing from Yahoo Internet Life was a bunch of bunk. The head network guy fabricated most of what was reported in that article. He finally got fired, and it seems the network is in much better hands now. Back in 1996, Case began an ill-fated switch from Ethernet to ATM, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but the ATM network never worked well, and ATM has never, and probably will never, catch on as a technology to the desktop. Old users never got ATM, they remained on the old, reliable, 10-Megabit network. They finally scrapped that system a few years ago and announced that they were going to convert the entire network over to switched gigabit, which should be pretty damn cool, and is an established technology.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
Like a lot of you I've been wondering what they could possibly be doing with all that bandwidth.
:-)
Then I thought, hey, they could have streaming live video lectures and video-conferencing. No need to leave your room!
Or even video-on-demand recorded lectures. No need to wake up at 7 AM to make that 8 AM lecture on the other side of campus! Just TiVO it!
Think of the possibilities!
Anyone know what they're really using it for? Or is just a stupid bullet point on the recruitment brochure?
Internet access != better education. Only if you use the bandwidth for educational purposes such as the above will it enhance education.
This may be true, but you weren't on campus when you woke up one morning and couldn't get to your webmail account because it took so long. :p I can't argue too much, though. I remember the ATM crapping out all the time a few years ago. I don't know if that was the outside line crapping or whatever, but its nice to see the reliability improve with the speed boost
I will never misspell afterwards on slashdot again.
...
I will never misspell afterwards on slashdot again.
I will never misspell afterwards on slashdot again.
I will never misspell afterwards on slashdot again.
I know I'm supposed to do this a 100 times, but it would be a little lenghty to post.
First thing: as many other alums have said -- the fibre's been there. That's not new.
Secondly, of course its "over-wired"... who needs more than 256 kB of main memory anyway?
who needs crazy shit from the people-fore-down-shit-your-neck-department, when you can simply use your own SX gigabit ethernet card instead of that converter.
? view=
doh!
just check the specs of that netgear crap and bring a decent fibre card along, instead of buying crap shit
Netgear GC102
http://www.netgear.com/products/details/GC102.php
do people always believe crap that other people tell them? why not reading the faqs and specs and using your own mind _before_ doing the first step.
get this world educated. brighten up at last
>Plus, downloading to your HD isn't the only thing you can do with a network. You can stream live lectures to people's rooms, use a network application server to allow students to access large server programs, VNC from the helpdesk with no choppiness, etc.
And those are only the legitimate uses. These are college dorms, here. I can think of any number of non-academic uses for that much bandwidth. Gaming, live video... With thousands of bright and sometimes bored minds at work, I'm sure that they'll come up with any number of things to piss off the administration.Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Gigabit bandwidth to every dorm room, all sharing a single 56k modem connected at 28.8k (bad line quality).
Hey, at least they can send porn and mp3 files around quickly to eachother!
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
This would heavily depend on how the network is wired. Ethernet LANs have problems under heavy load, so if sections of the network are becoming saturated, a broader pipe is necessary. This is because ethernet uses sensing and collisions rather than tokens which work exactly the opposite (bad under light load, good under heavy).
Strangely, though, this doesn't seem to be the case. The Netgear converter typically is connected to a switch, so collisions would be unlikely. Since each user is required to buy one, shared bandwidth isn't the problem. If this were up to me, I'd buy one switch per dorm and buy a much cheaper hub to split to machines and other devices. Unless students are running 3 or 4 (or more, depending on compression) HD-TV quality video streams, they're not going to come close to saturating the bandwidth.
Grrr... I'm going to BU in the fall and would love for something like this to be in my dorm room. Unfortunately I'll have to make do with 10/100. I guess I'll live. But wait, then the 10/100/1000 port on my Mac goes unused. Oh, the humanity.
Wow! What a waste of money! I cannot believe that somebody is actually falling for it. I would rather see cheaper tuition than a completely useless fiber. Let's face it: for what most of the students do, T10 is fast enough.
I suspect many of /. readers will write up an angry message to me and mod this post down. But I do not really care about my rate karma on /. as much as I care about colleges wasting money on things like plasma TVs and very fast internet. Why? Well, because based on my experience, those things do not add anything to education.
When I was getting my degree in computer science, I spent a good fraction of my time in front of the computer. I do not remember a single comp. sci. assignment that required a fiber internet connection or a terabyte of space. In fact, most of my performance problems were related to the couple of slow hard drives sitting in my box. When I copied large files, my hard drives could not keep up; the network was just fine.
Why am I ranting here? There is a simple reason for that. I paid for my education out of my own pocket and throught loans under my name. When you spend your own money, you tend to count everything and it bothers me that some colleges choose to show off with the latest -- and sometimes useless -- technology, expensive concerts and other crap that does not really matter, while there are students who do not have enough financial aid. My beloved schools decided that it was absolutely necessary to have plasma TVs in dining halls and beefedup PowerMacs in the dean's office (like if the dude was going to use the DVD burners on a daily basis). What is up with that?
As a student, I would not mind having nice(er) computer labs, more computer access points on campus and more financial aid.
Ciao.
Right now if they want to spend a few grand on the NICs. You can pick up a gigabit fiber NIC for $170 so while it is more expensive than copper it's not a significant cost.
As I understand it, they fibered the place in 88, CAT5 didn't exist until 93.
Just think, gigabit to the desktop or 10gig to the desktop and gigabytes of dirt cheap RAM. Hard disks would become mythical beasts.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Uh, yeah, that's a viable business plan...
Slash and Dot, "Still smokin'"
Also what are the regulations on sharing?
... but you only need the fast backbones for that, not Gb/s to the rooms. Backing up your HD across the net is nice, but again really niche ... and requiring huge traffic caps.
Without sharing and huge local traffic caps (dozens of GB a week, preferably 100s) this is overkill.
There are some other niche applications, but nothing major. Multicasting some video on the network is nice
So, the fact that I have a 10/100/1000 copper connection means that I can't connect to their network?
I went to Case from 1997-99. At least back then, you are right.
Case was using 155Mb ATM over fiber into each dorm room. I think I still have my PCI ATM adapter somewhere (don't tell anyone, they cost a fortune back then). I believe they boasted the largest ATM installation outside of General Motors. (The fiber has been in place for well over 10 years - I think they chose to install it in 1988.)
Anyway, not everyone could use the fiber directly, (were there ISA ATM cards?) and while I don't recall the details from the time, there was some sort of dongle+packet translation into Ethernet, which played havoc with the overall network traffic regarless of what kind of machine you brought to the party.
I do remember hearing things had changed a bit (I transfered out to NYU) - and here is a good article that seems to discuss a good bit of Case's IT history.
As an aside, CWRU students do put this to work - Hell, I knew someone who got a RIAA letter in 1997 for ftp serving. Even back then, files on the local SMB network would put many P2P systems to shame. To be fair though, there were many who put it to good and innovative use. And if you ever have to deal with ATM and Linux, CWRULUG (though out of date) would be a good place to start.
At Case, its probably only 50% that have no use for Gig Ethernet - and the other half is very happy to take their share of the bandwidth.
Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.
in regards to a tradtitional education anyway. I would rather pay for better professors who are inspiring and capable and for better classrooms and labs than Internet access. How many more distractions do the students need?
Back in the mid 90's when I was in university, you were just suposed to:
a) get drunk one or twice per week
b) date girls
a) study
How are they hoping to do a, b and c with fiber in the dorm?
I am not sure why ATM sucked so bad at CASE but the ATM network deployed at Pearl Harbor works great (155Mbit to the desktop even with 300MHz P2). Tons and tons and tons of fiber all around the base and everything runs great. They even provide a few of the popular cable news network feeds over this ATM network such as FOX, CNN, Bloomber, and I think a few others that I can't recall. The only copper drop that was around was for the analog phones. In fact, even a year ago you would probablly still have a hard time trying to find a cat-5 drop. Keeps people from 'hooking' un-authorized equipment (personal systems) into the network so less chance for an outside contamination. Too bad now they are moving over to ethernet and no more on-demand video. *sigh*
What the hell? Case has had fiber to the dorm room for about 15 years now.
Haha. Northeast Ohio weather gets a little old after a while, for sure. As a lifelong Geauga county resident (snowbelt), I can't remember how many times I've heard Dick Goddard say, "We can expect a trace to 3 inches of snow here in Cleveland, 4 inches to 2 feet in the snowbelt"
:-)
Avegrage yearly snowfall is around 110" (2.8m), and we picked up 226" (5.4m) locally in 1996.
For those of you reading this from Europe thinking, "Ha, we get three times as much here in the Alps!", realize that
a) NE Ohio isn't mountainous and
b) we're only located about 40 degrees north latitude.
Lake-effect snow makes life very interesting. Ask anyone from here, along I-90, and up through eastern New York state.
I spent the last winter in Raleigh, North Carolina, and loved watching the whole city shut down when they got a couple of inches. I could live with another winter like that...
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
As a former student who transfered out last year, I can tell you that the gigabit ethernet and wireless everywhere thing was nice and all, but the money could have been spent elsewhere. Maybe to aid their struggling liberal arts department. Or maybe even to be put into Athletics. I remember our equipment and uniforms were in such bad shape that the equip. manager told us not to wear our jackets around campus because they were already so run down. When youre supposedly in the same league as Emory, NYU and UChicago, you cant pull such penny pinching. It was embarassing going to track meets against them. Bottom line is that theyre obviously not putting the money into anything that truly makes the campus attractive for prospective students. Check out the over 70% acceptance rate. Thats ridiculous for a top 50 school. Case can have their gratuitous gigabit. I'll take a better college experience over that any day.
Also, gig fiber to the desktop *is* nice. Try pulling down a complete set of ISOs (MSDNAA, BSD, Linux, whatever). The more the better, in my opinion. The equipment really isn't that expensive.
$200+ is not expensive? Especially given that you can buy complete desktop computers for $600 now?
There's a good reason to recommend Dell. CWRU made arrangements with Dell to have offer a system with gigabit fiber already installed, at a decent cost. I don't think you'll find many computer retailers out there that even sell gigabit fiber cards, let alone preinstall them for you. For many students who don't regularly tinker with their innards of their PC, it's appreciated.
*lengthy
You've also got to keep in mind the $500 or so that students are charged as a "technology fee" to offset the cost of this network. It is by no means free, or included in the tuition.
Like many schools, Case has a local DirectConnect hub that restricts to local network users only. You can usually get a good 10-12MB/s transfer rate over it.
The Case network staff is pretty laisez-faire when it comes to the network. If you start hogging too much bandwidth on a regular basis, they will give you a call and potentially throttle your port. I only have this happen once, when I left a bittorrent on overnight that was running at 0.5MB/s upload for about 12 hours straight. They gave me a call, said knock it off, and throttled my speeds for a day or so. After that, it was fine.
As a student at Case Western Reserve University I can say that the fiber provides nice bandwidth but is a hassle in many other respects. If you have a gigibit copper port on your machine you can get away with the GC102, however if you have 10/100 equipment you are forced to buy a $500 Allied Telesyn 12 Port switch with gigabit uplink. If you were an upper classman and were around when they changed over from the ATM system they provide you with the necessary equipment. The whole system is overkill; fiber is everywhere, even in the library. Which is great if you want to lug a fiber to Ethernet converter or 12 port switch and all the associated cables with you. The ITS department is working to improve this, wireless is available virtually anywhere on campus, however to use any restricted resources you have to use a VPN client (In order to download this client you have to connect your computer to a faceplate, so you cant just be totally wireless). There are new dorms going up as we /. And they are being wired with gigabit copper, so I guess they have seen the folly of their ways. We only get gigabit speeds across campus, our outbound internet connection was 100Mbps for most of the year, but our ISP got tired of giving us bandwidth for free and cut us back to the 44mbps we pay for. When this happened you could actually hear the nerds start crying because this bandwidth is shared between all the dorms, academic, administrative and research buildings. Bottom line: Its may be glamorous but it is an expensive investment to fuel the on-campus porn ring.
Does anyone else find it strange that /.ers are bitching about a school that has fiber to every room?
Where are the questions about network topology, TCO over the past 15 years, types of network hardware and plans for future upgrades? Seriously, that's what interests us, not a discussion that amounts to bashing what is really a pretty decent school on their decision to overwire?
I would have killed for an overwired college. I went to Oberlin, about 20 miles from Case, and, in the words of a previous post, would have given my left nut for a decent on-campus network, much less a 45mb (potentially 1000mb!!) internet connection.
But in the spirit of the bitching I've seen -- the Yahoo! rankings mean/meant nothing. As was mentioned before, they were based solely on a survey sent out to IT administrators at the schools.
--------------------- -me, Crusher of those who are Foolish (don't be foolish)
yes because you usualy watch the whole 3 hours of a porn right?
if it's so, you are everygirl dream!
PEDANTIC
College students will never have a meaningfull say in this country until they can be bothered to vote or show a willingness to donate / organize for political groups (however, as you no doubt meant, today's college students may well have a big say in this country in the future).
Think the war in Iraq is wrong? Think pot shouldn't be a schedule A drug? Nobody cares unless your voting block can make a difference in an election.
/PEDANTIC
It's not the size of your .sig that matters, it's how you use it.
The only meaningful use I can imagine for such a network is to build a kind of Grid/Cluster out of all the students computers for carrying out HEAVY computational tasks.....
Du kan glomma dina ensama stunder, du kan lita paa teknikens under - Wilmer X
actually i thought it was 48v DC so that it didn't interfear with the transmissions of the phone?
if you use a 56k modem thats exactly whats going on
...this is also the same bookstore that around 1996 offered to price match on every book in the store. Students walked in with web page printouts showing books at 10% of list and got some pretty big refunds. I also started CWRU in 1994, and whether it was ahead of the curve or not campus-wide doom and descent games were probably the fastest you could find at the time.
This reeks of prestige spending. Some fat cat university head decided to outdo a competitor school or wanted his school to be at the top of a list. Students have no say in how our money is spent - I cringe every time I see my school (memphis.edu) throwing up a new water fountain in front of an administration building or a pointless clock tower a few feet taller than every other school in the area. This high speed connection may be great for a handful of geeks, but will be totally useless to 95% of students. The wireless internet is great, but come on. What the hell is a Chemistry, History or Business major supposed to do with a connection like this?
-48VDC for the on-hook line. It drops to 6-9VDC when you pick up the reciever and the ring pulses are in the range of 80-100VAC. That way they can be filtered out with a couple of capacitors and talking won't make the bell ring. Of course their phones are probably digital so I don't think any of that applies.
It sounds like they ran fiber to all the dorm rooms just so they could say, "Hey! Look! We have fiber run to all the dorm rooms!"
Actually, they've had fiber running to all of the dorm rooms for close to 10 years now. I had a fiber connection my freshman year (1994).
The biggest problem that I realized was when I graduated and LEFT the campus and realized how crappy the rest of the world has it for an internet connection. (just a 56k modem for a couple years until they finally offered DSL in my neighborhood.) Hell, we used to download MP3s [and this is before they became popular; we always had to rip our own] and video porn in a matter of seconds. Now it takes minutes or hours!
Karma: NaN
A floppy drive is recommended for CWRU students? Aren't those obsolete? I haven't used floppies since last century.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
if most universities police file sharing, block lots of ports, etc. what can you do with it, besides maybe download linux iso's? you can't run a server on most university networks without permission...i agree with previous posters that all that bandwidth will simply be wasted.
Their blurbs say they've got lots of wireless around, but wireless is pretty short-range stuff - I'd guess that it's in the academic buildings and eating areas, but that doesn't mean that they've also installed much wireless coverage in the already-wired dorms.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The network is fast and we don't have the regular network outages all over campus that were the mark of his reign.
Especially last semester, the network was slowing to a near halt almost daily.. There are constantly problems with OARnet, and I rarely get download speeds that I would call fast. It's way over hyped..
It used to be that freshman with laptops had to buy a $200 converter box, well last year they got to trade those in for neat little switches.. damn i'm jealous.
I went to CWRU for Physics, Class of 1993. It was great -- IMHO the physics classes were uniformly good, with but a single exception. (Hey, one can't win them all.)
:) Also, the EE undergrads I knew were none too happy, and I also heard stories about Comp Sci's troubles. But none of this affected the happiness of the physicists, chemists, and biologists that I knew.
Since then things may have gotten even better. As I was walking out the door at graduation time I got to shake the hand of Lawrence Krauss, who had just arrived to become Chairman of the department. He seemed pretty cool. I also know that the department got some spiffy new labs and equipment over the next few years. (Not that I didn't get plenty of good education using the old stuff...)
It is a big mistake to generalize about any school based on the activities of a few departments, let alone a single professor. Universities are huge, and decentralized; each little corner stands on its own. For example, in my day, the physics department was great, but CWRU's math department had a terrible reputation among the undergrads. (Everyone said there were a few math professors who could teach, but that they had trouble getting tenure. I ended up learning all my math from the physicists.
At any school larger than a couple of hundred people, you have to shop department by department (and, for grad school, adviser by adviser). Believe me, there are horrifying experiences to be had at Harvard, Cornell, and MIT as well.....
Well if the education part were true the internet part might be nice. But here's a bit of a wake up for anyone pondering this snipette of reality. The latest president of CWRU has cut EVERYTHING out of the budget. There is not really any such thing there anymore as a school sponsored activity. The reasoning? Well I'm glad you asked. You see, anytime this new president considers cutting something and adding the funds elsewhere, he asks,"How do we compare to MIT?"
Yes... CWRU is attempting to become MIT. The amazing thing is that the idiot in charge actually says this stuff out loud to the student body. It is a huge joke to everyone at the school, apparently everyone except the administration.
On a side note, lovely that they are charging an arm and a leg to connect to the internet when I'm sure most students would be just as happy with a free RJ45 connection. Also fiber to ethernet kits only cost about $100, and the school is charging over $200... wow. screw you anyway they can.
FOr the record, the graduate studies at CWRU are good, but don't bother going there for undergrad.
Oat bran muffins with a side of coffee will do the trick.
...it's the right thing to do.
Actually, I've been on campus practically every day since 1995.
Perhaps they'd rather not spend money repeatedly re-wiring the LAN as bandwidth requirements increase.
And how many 16,000 drop rewires have you managed, from conception, to bid, to install?
What? None? Then SHUT THE FUCK UP.
If you had half a clue, you'd know that a proper wiring job means that re-wiring is not so bad.
Given that they probably spent 5 - 10x what it would of cost to wire the rooms for 100Mbit in 1993 and no students will actually stress a 100Mbit connection for another 10 years (in terms of practical applications, not P2P or warez sharing), maybe you can see how a 20 year return on 10x the cost probably isn't a good thing.
Furthermore, in that 20 years, each connection probably saw at a minimum 5 "new" students each having to purchase a $200 media converter.
Oh, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Over 20 years:
5x - 10x initial cost
+ $1000 per drop charged to students in the form of a media converter
As opposed to:
3x initial cost (1x for initial install and then 2x for install of Cat5e for 1000MBit)
Somebody better have gotten fired for that math.
I bet that my campus is more wired that those nasty little universities. They have electric wires going to every dorm!
Did anyone else think that this was could be about dorm food? More fruit and veggies, some oat flakes for breakfast? It could change the input/output ballance for the entire student body.....
I can see it now, the ultimate grudge match.
:)
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! In this corner welcome our UNDEFEATED defending CHAMPION, SIXTEEN THOUSAND GIGABIT FIBER PORTS IN STUDENT DORM ROOMS!
And tonight's challenger, ready to take on the world... A MULTIPLE OC-192 CONNECTION OUTBOUND TO THE WORLD OF P2P FILESHARING!
The bell rings, GIGABIT DORMS COMES OUT SWINGING... and it's A KO! THE OC-192 HAS MELTED! COMPLETELY VAPORIZED, THIS IS INCREDIBLE!
Back to the drawing board.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
Why am I reminded of Hillenbrand Hall at Purdue? Brand new dorm, "ethernet in every room" trumpted from the rooftops, *parallel port* ethernet adapters provided to students for a hefty fee.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
its not only about down speeds, but space. my school is fiber around campus but cat5 in classes, none of the boxen here could handle the raw power of a fiber connection, but it gives them room for file sharing and accomidating several thousand pc's on one network.
According to their VP of IS, they were future proofing to save money in the long term. I just hope they tested their current CAT5 for 1000baseT operation and it failed (I doubt it). If it was good enough, 1000baseT would have carried them through at least another six years and they would have only needed to upgrade the switches. Something tells me that this VP was just spending for the bling-bling and is a non-technical, overpaid, PHB. If I'm right, the fucker should be fired for wasting school and student money. A friend of mine working at a pretty big company just went through the same ordeal with his PHB. She (The PHB) got featured in an article because she upgraded to the buzzword "Fiber".
Check out these links for some good information and specs. Also, I managed to dig up some information provided by the company that installed the fiber.
-Lucas
No matter how you spin it, you're still in Ohio. Now if they supplied free beer (to help you forget where you are) along with that fast network access...
Dr. Rick
- "It's such a fine line between clever and stupid" (Nigel Tufnel)
- Zort! (Pinky)
I wish my school did that. My university is stuck in the 1980's. They have a fiber optic cable running underground on campus but they're too afraid to use, I guess. They would rather let the network get so bogged down and use out-of-date technology.
Hmm. Is that some kind of back-up in case the real universities don't admit you?
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Wow, now that you've read about the cream of the crop, now read about the utter piece of crap the University of Kentucky is.
The University of Kentucky has cablemodems in ALL dorms--excluding the new ones currently being built and expected to open Fall 2005. They suffer from the exact same problems as normal (the more the less merrier) and ocasionally screw up and need to get "rebooted," meaning unplug it and plug it back in, WAIT 3-10 minutes for it to establish a link. Next, the speed is capped at 100KBps and upload capped at 5KBps (to deter filesharing and game playing). UK saw that it is better to install cablemodems instead of hard wiring campus.
Wireless? Yeah, we have that 802.11b... and sadly, it's the fastest connection on campus (where available and not in the dorms!).
I guess that beast needs the handle just so you can carry it.
And I'm sure this person prob doesn't think twice about a little wardriving or what have you.
"Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
Hey, that's funny, I didn't see anything reminding users to "not look directly at laser with remaining eye".
Ok, ok, so the fiber is multimode and is lit up with LEDs, give me a break.
But Case DID dump tens of millions of dollars on the network in recent years.
The estimate of the cost in the residence halls alone, which is only maybe 2500 of those 16000 ports, was $7 million. We were able to come up with that esimate based on the statement that the $400 yearly technology fee would take seven years to pay for the installation and there are about 2500 students. That's $2800 per port, and the cabling was already installed!
That was just for distribution equipment and the cost of replacing network equipment for students. Then add the other 13500 ports. Then add wireless. Then add operating costs. Then you have tens of millions of dollars.
Other schools don't come near that port cost, including the cost running new wiring. It's quite a cost difference that, in some way, shape or form, the students eventually pay for!
Currently, all of the Gigabit Ethernet in our network is over multimode fiber. We will probably start using Gigabit over copper (1000baseTX) in the next couple of months. Does anyone have some first-hand experiences with Gig over copper (positive or negative) to share with /. ?
Coed porn sites are REALLY in trouble!
Ever notice how fast Windows runs? Neither do I - get Mac OS
That also takes care of one of the concerns I had about their system, which was access for laptops that don't have GigE in them. (Sure, you can get a GigE switch for about $100 now that'll connect your $200 fiber/GigE to your laptop's 10/100, but it's yet another annoying frob to pay for.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks