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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...
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!
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.
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).
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Ridiculous overkill. How about putting the money towards lowering sky high tuition costs?
Self awareness - try it!
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.
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...
One gig of RAM isn't necessary? Geez, when's the last time you tried to load a FarCry map on Windows XP Pro with all the service packs and even just the minimal functional tray icon crap?
I upgraded from 512M to 768M recently and the difference was just stunning. Trust me, a gig of RAM is most certainly not pushing the limits of human needs. It's pushing the limits of programmer inefficiency and incompetence, but it's not pushing it for actual users.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
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
Fiber!=high bandwidth
Lots of people seem to forget this.
Martin
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. :)
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.
What really surprises me is that "traditional" tech universities don't hold the top spots.
Perhaps because they rather spend their money on teaching instead of all kinds of frivolous stuff.
Did you happen to go to college?
I can assure you that we college students do much more than research and paper writing. What we should (in your eyes) be doing doesn't matter.
After having said that, my machine has a 1.3ghz Celeron w/ 512MB RAM and it works fine for everything (besides playing games). I often recommend cheaper systems, not top-of-the-line, to friends looking for new machines. Most machines are ridiculously overpowered, which is fine if you don't mind blowing the extra money.
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.
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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 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.
Many banks and instituions require Internet Explorer because of it's "security". I'm pretty damn skeptical about how smart they'll be when requiring me to boot from a specific OS.
"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.
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
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?
Most of the smartest and most learned people I know in tech fields picked up the bulk of their expertise from personal projects, not academic curricula.
This is not to knock college education; I think mine was invaluable. But don't just write off everything other than teaching as "frivolous". The ones who really learn are the ones who are driven to do it on their own. All they need is an environment that empowers them to do so, not someone to hold their hand or push them along.
Also, what you think of as "traditional" tech universities are probably known for the prestige of their technical grad studies, not necessarily the quality of their undergraduate educational environment.
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)
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 I would hope that most people try to find a balance between geekdom and physical activity. I'm a comp sci major and I'm on my schools cross country and track teams. Why am I in the minority? I would think that with the amount of supposed intelligence boasted by most posters, that they would realize that being of sound mind AND BODY is a good philosophy.