Fiber To The Dorm Room 447
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
-N
Re:Over-wired? (Score:5, Funny)
Get out. You're not welcome around here.
Re:Over-wired? (Score:5, Interesting)
What's wrong with copper?
Re:Over-wired? (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:3, Informative)
There are limits, but the limits are pretty long. Multimode fiber typically has a limit of about 2km. Singlemode fiber will typically have ranges up to 100km. Multimode is less expensive then singlemode and probably what this university is useing.
Re:Over-wired? (Score:4, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Over-wired? and tooo far ahead of the curve (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Over-wired? and tooo far ahead of the curve (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
Derek
Re:Over-wired? and tooo far ahead of the curve (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds to me like someone had a fair bit of foresight.
Re:Over-wired? (Score:2)
or even will be able to without the network admins kicking your sorry ass from the network.
hell, by now they could've provided the 1gbit with normal cheapo ethernet parts in most buildings probably.
how about wireless?
Re:Over-wired? (Score:2, Informative)
Just think... (Score:2)
Network Bootable (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:2)
It's highly unlikely I would trust booting from a remote source to happen securely, especially when I'm assuming the network boot BIOS isn't too likely to tunnel that through SSH or something.
-N
Re:Network Bootable (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Network Bootable (Score:2)
And in the parent's examples, online banking, a thin client would be the only thing needed. You could net boot a minimal OS; kernel, tcp stack, lightweight X client, and the desktop app, complete your translation securely, and reboot to whatever OS you run normally.
Netgear? Peh (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Netgear? Peh (Score:3, Funny)
it time... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:it time... (Score:3, Funny)
i get it (Score:2)
Re:it time... (Score:2)
You're going to pay 30-40 thousand US dollars per year to go there.
You're going to be living in a very urban area of the east side of Cleveland. I'm sorry, the east side isn't urban, it's CULTURED. I should know, I've lived on the east side of Cleveland for the better part of the past 16 years.
Sidebar:
The other folks who are complaining about "the mistake on the lake" are either sheltered and have been stuck in Euclid for the past 10 years, or heard something bad about Clevland once in a joke
Good moves... Gotta start somewhere (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good moves... Gotta start somewhere (Score:2)
I disagree. Copper is absolutely fine for the desktop. There's no reason to use fibre unless your network point isn't close enough, which is unlikely. Fibre for the backbone is perfectly sensible, since that's the area where you're most likely to need to increase speed. Copper is far easier to work with, and far cheaper, and unless you need 10gbit to the desktop (I know students consume a lot of ba
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good moves... Gotta start somewhere (Score:3, Interesting)
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 scho
Re:Good moves... Gotta start somewhere (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=4
of course. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
100 MBit is good enough for anybody (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:100 MBit is good enough for anybody (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:100 MBit is good enough for anybody (Score:2)
While fiber is not cheap, manpower is also not cheap and only getting more expensive. If they had to redo wiring might as well switch to fiber now, and avoid the re-wiring hassle in 10 years.
so who will ever need more than.... (Score:5, Funny)
two words: innovation and time (Score:2)
How do you inn
Re:two words: innovation and time (Score:2)
By your logic, we can cure the ills of the Third World simply by throwing money at their problems. Oh wait...
I went to college, this will get used for warez, pr0n, and Kazaa, nothing more. One kid will keep saying things like "But imagine a Beowulf cluster, we could make a cluster out of the whole dorm!" and hand out Kloppix CDs, which the rest of the dorm will use as coasters under their bon
Re:100 MBit is good enough for anybody (Score:2)
Unless they're using Voice over IP phones. Still, gigabit to the desktop in a dorm room is ridiculous. I don't even have that at work.
Why run "expensive" fiber? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
file sharing (Score:2, Funny)
*cough*kickback*cough* (Score:5, Insightful)
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* (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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. :)
Re:Support issue (Score:2)
So yes, it MAY be convenient for repairs, but I don't see how there ISN'T some partnership type deal go
Re:*cough*kickback*cough* (Score:2)
what a waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:what a waste (Score:3, Interesting)
MIT, for example, is $30.6k/year.
Couple of questions (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Couple of questions (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Couple of questions (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Couple of questions (Score:2)
No, an internet connection doesn't really need to be fibre based. But internal network activity will benefit, and fibre will give them room to grow.
Plus, this will prepare them for an Internet2 [internet2.edu] upgrade in the future.
Re:Couple of questions (Score:2, Interesting)
Simple: The network also easily carries the phone and all TV signals. No further cabling needed.
(I've been at Case.)
Re:Couple of questions (Score:2)
Who says people are accessing the internet for EVERYTHING? One real convenient reason to have incredibly fast on-campus internet is so you can VNC into, or mount shares on your dorm room computer from any machine on campus, and not have to deal with slow-down.
What about people who work with large data sets? I know this won't be a big thing for many undergrads, but it sure is nice to have a big pipe connecting your dorm room to your lab computer.
Hmmm...SERVER FARM!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm...SERVER FARM!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Lots of people seem to forget this.
Re:Hmmm...SERVER FARM!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Minimum my ass (Score:2, Insightful)
What about laptops? (Score:2, Informative)
Um... about that Yahoo survey... (Score:3, Informative)
why do you need a media converter? (Score:3)
Re:why do you need a media converter? (Score:2)
Large intranet bandwidth attracts RIAA attention? (Score:2)
It's not like they require the song sharing to take place over the internet in order to go after people...
Re:Large intranet bandwidth attracts RIAA attentio (Score:5, Insightful)
Old news (Score:2)
Case adminstration... (Score:2, Informative)
Really Old News (16 years old) (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Informative)
The one drawback is (Score:3, Funny)
University of Delaware (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:University of Delaware (Score:3, Insightful)
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 "t
I went there (Score:4, Interesting)
Holy crap, since when is this news?! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
I'm curious if it will even be used (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Labor Costs (Score:3, Insightful)
Not a good education (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not a good education (Score:3, Interesting)
Computing at Case took a wierd turn. In 1968, the school spun off the CS department as a private company, called Chi Corporation. Chi operated as a computer service bureau, developed their own operating system, and sold
Should have majored in Physics (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [amazon.com], 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
Looks familiar (Score:2)
A big waste of money?
I've seen a lot of overreacting here (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Fiber? heh... (Score:2, Funny)
Sometimes I make initial odd interpretations like that, such as when this guy remarked that some basketball player grew an extra foot in a year. So I said, in all seriousness, "Really? Where'd he grow it?"
worth the price? (Score:3, Informative)
To add to the problem, most commodity PCs can't handle gigabit anyway. The garden-variety PCI implementation tops out at about 50 MB/s, so you aren't even getting everything you're paying for unless you pay for a system with PCI-X or better.
What are they smoking? (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
like 18 years ago at Stanford (Score:3, Informative)
Argh. Explanation (Score:5, Informative)
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_Tou
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.
Pearl Harbor and CASE (Score:3, Informative)
Not new (Score:3, Interesting)
Money Not Well Spent (Score:5, Interesting)
This is just weird (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
(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? (Score:3, Insightful)
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:why the need for this? (Score:2)
Garcia is our dictator! Listen to him or be smitten.
LCD (Score:2)
Re:why the need for this? (Score:2)
That's probably the idea. It's harder for the *AA police to prove anything about what happens on a local network, and it costs them nothing, unlike internet trading which sucks up a fortune in bandwidth.
Who'll bother with transfers at maybe 128k from some internet system when they have access to everyone else's stuff at gigabit?
Re:why the need for this? (Score:3, Insightful)
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, whic
Re:why the need for this? (Score:2)
This is the best reason, aside from sheer naivete, that they would take the default configurations for the macs (at least for the 17" PowerBook and the G5) of a SuperDrive, which includes the DVD-R, and replace with the ComboDrive. I'm also curious about why you need a 15" screen minimum -- what about those nifty 12" powerbooks?
Re:why the need for this? (Score:3, Informative)
You're talking about a PC that is just used for word processing papers. But you are out badly of touch with today's modern world.
Student presentations these days don't involve standing in front of an OHP talking. A lot of students use PowerPoint, embedded sound and video clips, digital photographs and so forth.
Students use a full range of media when doing course work. At
Re:Err... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Recommend Dell or Apple (Score:4, Insightful)