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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."
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.
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Whose HD can constantly suck up more than a 100 MB pipe?
100 MByte/sec HD != 100Mbit network
You only realistically get about 10MBytes/second over a 100Mbit network. So Gigabit (1000 Mbit) would be closer to the hard drive limit. SATA drive are capable of 150 MByte/second transfer rate, although not many production drive currently do today.
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.
why run expensive fiber when you can run cheapo Cat 5
Becase it's a big undertaking to rewire a campus, so you'd better do it right and prepare for the future, instead of locking yourself into today/yesterday's technology.
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Yup.. My girlfriend goes there now and has fiber running directly to her room. However, the media converter they give you outputs 10mbit if I remember correctly.
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).
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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.
Actually, we have an OC12 to our service provider's PoP, with commodity Internet capped at 45Mb/s (usually pegged during the afternoons and evenings when the dorms are occupied) and (afaik) uncapped Internet 2 which usually sits around 18Mb/s.
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
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At Gigabit speeds, fiber lets you run much longer drops...the NOC can be much, much farther away from your computer.
Over twisted pair, you have to be within 100m, by cable length. I don't think there's a signal-based limit to fiber.
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So for a campus...no problem.
Another thing to consider is they may have actually been looking ahead to the future. I remember reading an article in 1991-1992 timeframe saying that the current PC technology had hit a plateau and there was little need for more powerful machines. Granted for a class of users this is true, but not many would want to be stuck with a 1 year old machine if they had a choice.
Putting network infrastructure into older buildings not originally designed for it is expensive. I can see how they may want a solution that will last them more then 2 or 3 years before a major upgrade cycle.
Another thought is this...apologies in advance to any alumni of this institution... but this is great marketing for a school that may otherwise have trouble distinguishing itself from the pack.
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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.
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.
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