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."

Comments

Over-wired?

[ThogScully]

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

what a waste

[hb253]

Ridiculous overkill. How about putting the money towards lowering sky high tuition costs?

Couple of questions

[Xugumad]

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.

Support issue

[ALecs]

Actually, (hate to burst your conspiracy theory) this is probably a support issue rather than a kickback or other nefarious scheme.

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. :)

This is just weird

[ianbnet]

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.