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."

Over-wired?

[ThogScully (589935)]

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

Re:Over-wired?

[Trigun (685027)]

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.

Get out. You're not welcome around here.

Re:Over-wired?

[jargoone (166102)]

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?

Re:Over-wired?

[Short Circuit (52384)]

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.

Re:Over-wired?

[Analogy Man (601298)]

80km

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.

Re:Over-wired?

[WindBourne (631190)]

Actually, it makes a lot of sense to do this. Unfortunately, they can now only afford a t1 connection to the internet. I guess that will solve the mp3 problem though.

Re:Over-wired? and tooo far ahead of the curve

[Merlin42 (148225)]

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 .

Re:Over-wired? and tooo far ahead of the curve

[tdemark (512406)]

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

Re:Over-wired? and tooo far ahead of the curve

[dhovis (303725)]

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.

Re:Over-wired? and tooo far ahead of the curve

[d-rock (113041)]

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

Re:Over-wired? and tooo far ahead of the curve

[Moderation abuser (184013)]

"It's unfortunate that they didn't install Cat5"

Sounds to me like someone had a fair bit of foresight.

Network Bootable

[swordboy (472941)]

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.

Re:Network Bootable

[TrentL (761772)]

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.

Netgear? Peh

[Yarn (75)]

Get one of these babies SK 9844 [syskonnect.com].

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.

it time...

[millahtime (710421)]

I think it's time to go back to grad school. and now i know where. wonder what grad degrees they have? oh well, that is just a little detail.

Re:it time...

[Elvisisdead (450946)]

Except for that it's in Cleveland. Drew Cary is full of crap.

Good moves... Gotta start somewhere

[Piranhaa (672441)]

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!

Re:Good moves... Gotta start somewhere

[falcon5768 (629591)]

99% of the homes running cable and DSL havent even hit 10 bit eithernets limits for any sustained time..

Copper Eithernet is hardly on its way out

of course. . .

[heller (4484)]

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.

100 MBit is good enough for anybody

[Gothmolly (148874)]

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.

Re:100 MBit is good enough for anybody

[Anonymous Custard (587661)]

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.

so who will ever need more than....

[millahtime (710421)]

And no one will ever need more than 640k.

Why run "expensive" fiber?

[Moderation abuser (184013)]

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.

*cough*kickback*cough*

[Lord_Dweomer (648696)]

"CWRU recommends the purchase of either a Dell or Apple for incoming students to meet networking requirements. "

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).

Re:*cough*kickback*cough*

[Zachary Kessin (1372)]

Universities often recomend specific computers, why? Well there are several resons, but majorly you know some of the computers will break and students will drag them down to the university computer shop and therefore it helps if you limit what most people are using to a few brands.

OK the geeks are going to buy what they want. But then again they probably can fix it on their own too.

I'm glad when I was at brandeis they had standard cat 5, my laptop at the time was a 10 year old powerbook duo that I picked up cheap on ebay and it would not be able to do anything with fiber.

Support issue

[ALecs (118703)]

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. :)

what a waste

[hb253 (764272)]

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

Couple of questions

[Xugumad (39311)]

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.

Hmmm...SERVER FARM!!!

[AppyPappy (64817)]

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.

Um... about that Yahoo survey...

[by Anonymous Coward]

While Case does have a lot going for it in this regard, please disregard that Yahoo story; Yahoo's 'research' into that reward was done by distributing surveys to the various institutions, and it's widely known that the VP in charge of ITS at the time 'won' CWRU that rank by lying through his teeth. Here's a reference, look near the bottom: http://www.onecleveland.org/Observer%204-9-04.htm.

why do you need a media converter?

[Squeezer (132342)]

shouldn't all you need be a fiber gigabit NIC and the proper fiber SC or ST (depending on what they use) patch cable?

Really Old News (16 years old)

[regen (124808)]

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).

What exactly is the point?

[Beowulf_Boy (239340)]

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.

Re:What exactly is the point?

[Dachannien (617929)]

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.

The one drawback is

[Timesprout (579035)]

they spent so much money on the fibre all the servers are hand me down Sinclair ZX81's.

University of Delaware

[The-Bus (138060)]

Couple of links:

100 Most Wired, 1999 [uwm.edu]
100 Most Wired, 2000 [education-india.net] (Case Western drops off the list)

The University of Delaware moved up to #2... then their network was brought to its knees due to file sharing (presumably it fell off the list in 2001).

What really surprises me is that "traditional" tech universities don't hold the top spots.

Disclaimer: UD alumn

Re:University of Delaware

[joib (70841)]

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.

I went there

[by Anonymous Coward]

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.

Holy crap, since when is this news?!

[Dachannien (617929)]

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 [onecleveland.org] as well.

Still, this is hardly *news* to anyone. It's been like this here for a long time.

Not a good education

[by Anonymous Coward]

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.

I've seen a lot of overreacting here

[magefile (776388)]

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 are they smoking?

[Rufus211 (221883)]

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).

Argh. Explanation

[sinnergy (4787)]

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.

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_Tour s/CWRUnet_Timeline.html [cwru.edu]

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.

Money Not Well Spent

[abonventre (784938)]

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.

This is just weird

[ianbnet (214952)]

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.

Re:obligatory

[Patrik_AKA_RedX (624423)]

yeah, students with gigabit 'net connection, now that must be good for grades.

It is, if you can see 3 hours worth of porn in under 5 minutes. That does leave you another 2h50 minutes of extra time to study.

(For those who're about to point out that 3 houres minus 5 minutes equals 2h 55 minutes: I assume 5 minutes to clean up. I mean, you do wash your hands afterwarts, right?)

Re:why the need for this?

[TellarHK (159748)]

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.

Re:Err...

[geniusj (140174)]

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.

Re:Large intranet bandwidth attracts RIAA attentio

[thedillybar (677116)]

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.

Re:Recommend Dell or Apple

[djeaux (620938)]

Now what exactly do they think students are going to download with this kind of connection other than movies and music? The engineering and science students who might have lots of data prob need their lab computers since it has all the needed software on it. My argument is, the bandwitdh will not help much in doing their assignments.

I agree that at present movies & music are probably going to be the top downloads. At present. But couldn't the availability of that much bandwidth make it actually possible for students to use distributed or client-server applications (or whatever the buzz word du jour happens to be), ultimately reducing the need for those specialized labs? Without the bandwidth, distributed applications are slugs & nobody wants to use them. But this much available bandwidth may make those applications truly feasible.