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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."
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.
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.
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
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.
Completely agree. 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!". Or maybe they have an agreement with the bookstore and manufacturer of the "media converter".
What's wrong with copper?
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.
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.
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.
Simple: The network also easily carries the phone and all TV signals. No further cabling needed.
(I've been at Case.)
Or, it's better to spend the money 15 years ago and reap the benefits of fiber that whole time (which is what actually happened).
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
While still definitely expensive (about $1100 per credit hour, or $26.5k/year for undergrads), tuition at CWRU is substantially less than that at private institutions with more name recognition.
MIT, for example, is $30.6k/year.
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).
How about VNC at 1600x1200x32bits?
Your video card is capable of consuming a lot more data than your hard drive can.
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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.
I hit the limit on 100BaseT at home ages ago. I now have Gigabit throughout. Its really the very simple things that hit it. Try playing a DVD quality movie over your net or watching live output from a firewire video camera without actually getting up and moving it to the PC that you're on. These are exactly the kinds of things that regular consumers should be doing but probably tried once and "learned their lesson" without knowing that all they needed was to have current networking technology.
If a school wants to support live multicast video conferencing in something other than stupid little 320 line windows, you need tech like this. Students should be working with tomorrows tech, not yesterdays.
What the hell? Case has had fiber to the dorm room for about 15 years now.
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.