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Wireless Everything at Dartmouth
hende_jman writes "Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire is condensing its phone, cable TV, and Internet services all into Wi-Fi, as reported by the New York Times (free registration required). The project, which started in 2001, has added 1400 WAPs and 24,000 wired ports. All that, and cost effective too."
TFA IT'S not that he doesn't like them or doubts his teaching ability, but Thomas H. Luxon, an English professor at Dartmouth College here, wants to see his students less next semester, hoping they will learn a lot more without having to look at him in a classroom. Professor Luxon, who teaches courses on Shakespeare, wishes they will instead be watching scenes from "The Merchant of Venice" or "Macbeth" on their PC's while sitting on a lawn, in a coffee shop or while relaxing in a dorm room. "That will be really cool," Professor Luxon said. "They could watch it on their own time and in their own place instead of having to go to the classroom or the media center. That means they could review it as often as they like, and they don't have to see it just once." Professor Luxon is able to release his students from the shackles of forced classroom movie viewing as a result of a major wireless convergence project that has taken Dartmouth's phone, cable and wireless systems and condensed them into one Wi-Fi network. The project, officials say, keeps students on the forefront of wireless technology, and opens up endless educational and teaching opportunities while saving the college millions of dollars. The switch, which started in 2001 and will be complete with the wireless cable rollout this fall, includes the addition of 1,400 wireless access points and 24,000 wired ports across the campus of the 236-year-old college, the first in the country to completely integrate its communications systems into a wireless infrastructure. "This really improves our ability to deliver types of information services that enhance teaching and learning," said Brad Noblet, Dartmouth's director of technical services. The first phase of the cable rollout will put the school's cable television system online. After that, students, professors and anyone else on the overall network will be able to make up his or her own "channel," showing movie clips, video projects or presentations with cable-quality video. The college's public affairs office hopes to have its own channel as well. It could also be used by students to shop for classes during course selection because they could view a few minutes of a lecture or discussion on the network, and by professors to provide discussion materials before class. Dartmouth also hopes to put all its public lectures and forums on a cable network instead of on the sometimes gritty streaming video now available. "We're really at the front end of this," said Jeffrey L. Horrell, dean of the libraries and librarian of the college. "It's not yet clear where the boundaries are." The new network could even change how students write papers. They will not replace words or writing, but might enhance, say, a paper on "The Merchant of Venice" with a clip of the actor Patrick Stewart explaining the method behind his portrayal of the character Shylock, said Professor Luxon, who teaches a course on the play. "Imagine writing a paper about one of these performances and including a video clip in your paper, like you would a quote," he said. "Now your paper isn't on paper anymore, it's on a Web site or a word file." The convergence project is meant for educational purposes, but it is not bad for entertainment, either. Students will be able to catch the latest episode of MTV's "Pimp My Ride" or any other television show anywhere on campus - including in class. While that is one more worry for professors who are now used to students staring at screens, they hope that the interaction and stimulation of a class will detract from the desire to tune in to "TRL" during sociology, Mr. Horrell said. Students, many of whom did not know about the new service, are enthusiastic. Jean Cowgill, 19, a freshman, hopes to use the network to watch materials outside of class. But, Ms. Cowgill said, the cable access might backfire. "That sounds amazing," she said. "But I don't know how great it will be for my study habits." Wireless data has been available here since 2001. Its success led the technology department to combine it with the college's
The simple fact is that today, in 2005, wireless doesn't work well at all. In the cases where it does work well, check how close the AP is. You'll see that it is so close that you might as well be using a cable anyway.
You're a suburbanite.
Research? What research? There is not much research going on at Dartmouth, unless they got a huge influx of researchers in last 4 years.
TANSTAAFL
My brother went to Dartmouth in 1993, and they required everyone to have a computer as they already had campus-wide "blitz mail," which was used a bit like IM. All their assignments were handed in via email, class cancellations were broadcast that way, etc. Everyone was on it.
Meanwhile, I was at Florida State in Tallahassee, where it wasn't until probably 1995 that you could even easily get a university email (we used to have to set up free city accounts at the public library, which we could then access from campus).
I don't know that it made much of a difference in his education, but he loved the wow factor and I'm sure that's at play here, too.
Dude, like, that's, like, what authentication is for.
...and I work at the helpdesk, no less. I've beta-tested the VOIP rollout and supported the rest. My personal opinion is that the wireless network will NOT hold up well under heavy load once all these services go into widespread use. As it stands now, things slow to a crawl during finals, etc, when people swarm the library and the APs. This is, after all, an 802.11b campuswide network. The backbone is there, but I don't know how the APs will deal with all these latency-sensitive streams. Side note: they've been promoting the VOIP option in the media for months now, but students aren't allowed to get extensions. A little disingenuous, no? Hell, I'd just be happy if the "100% coverage" actually ever gave me a signal in my room. There's some content, and prospects, for this--but so far, it's just PR-fluff.
The article leaves out some cool stuff like they use Vocera which act like StarTrek communicator badges. I get a kick out of asking where a specific person is and because of the aceess point they are connected to the computer answers back with their location and if you would like to call them, all while walking across the campus. And they also leave out the fact that they don't bother using any security on their 802.11 though.
Yes, if the multicasting is done correctly.
The short answer is that you don't actually have to multicast all twelve billion (slight exageration) channels simultaneously all the way to the set top boxes, just whatever 12 channels the people on the LAN are using (looking at this from the POV of a residential cable system based on Gig-E fiber to the home). If this is done inteligently, you can multicast only those channels being viewed and use IGMP snooping to figure out what to start multicasting from the cable head end. Depending on the exact network configuration (PON, active, etc), the multicast pruning might be done in the network, in the CPE, etc.
As for bandwidth, yes, it does matter what codec you use, but MPEG-2 for standard resolution TV is 4-6 MB/sec (IIRC). HDTV is another matter entirely, as it's huge (especially when uncompressed).
I'd write more, but it's time for lunch.
Digital cable and statelite typically use 2-2.5mbits for SD programing. With proper multicasting, QOS, large frames, you could probably get 500mbits onto GigE without trashing the network, giving us 250 SD channels.
HD mpeg2 needs about 18mbits, and HD divx needs 10-12mbps. I believe DVDs run at 4-5 mbits, and the quality is better than digital cable or satelite.
The copper is actually short, less than a mile, less than 1000ft in many cases. They use HFC, hybrid fiber/coax. It's fiber nearly until it gets to you. What's more, it's heavily insulated/shielded coax, and has alot more bandwidth than the standard telco loop.
Contrast this with a telco loop which can be 5+ miles of unshielded copper.