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Education The Internet Science Technology

Fiber To The Dorm Room 447

Posted by timothy from the at-that-price-they-better dept.
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."
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Fiber To The Dorm Room More

Fiber To The Dorm Room

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  • Over-wired? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ThogScully ( 589935 ) <neilsd@neilschelly.com> on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @07:48AM (#9313536) Homepage
    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? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Trigun ( 685027 ) <evil&evilempire,ath,cx> on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @07:50AM (#9313551)
      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? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jargoone ( 166102 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @07:56AM (#9313603)
      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? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Short Circuit ( 52384 ) <mikemol@gmail.com> on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:38AM (#9313958) Homepage Journal
        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? (Score:3, Informative)

          by Bishop ( 4500 )
          I don't think there's a signal-based limit to fiber.

          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:5, Funny)

      by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:00AM (#9313635) Journal
      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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Merlin42 ( 148225 ) * on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:09AM (#9313711)
      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 (Score:5, Interesting)

        by tdemark ( 512406 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:29AM (#9313885) Homepage
        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 (Score:5, Informative)

          by dhovis ( 303725 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @10:03AM (#9314886)

          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)

        by d-rock ( 113041 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:30AM (#9313894) Homepage
        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
    • * I'll never realistically utilize.*

      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?

  • ...how fast the retrans will be when they hit the choke point!

  • Network Bootable (Score:5, Interesting)

    by swordboy ( 472941 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @07:49AM (#9313542) Journal
    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.
    • I wouldn't use it. I don't connect insecure machines to the internet, until I've had time to really work on them. My servers get built from Debian distributions, firewalled off, then updated from patches before they touch a connection.

      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)

      by TrentL ( 761772 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:44AM (#9314016) Homepage
      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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Yarn ( 75 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @07:50AM (#9313544) Homepage
    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... (Score:5, Funny)

    by millahtime ( 710421 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @07:50AM (#9313547) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • Except for that it's in Cleveland. Drew Cary is full of crap.
    • Downsides:

      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)

    by Piranhaa ( 672441 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @07:51AM (#9313554)
    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!

  • of course. . . (Score:5, Interesting)

    by heller ( 4484 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @07:51AM (#9313555) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @07:51AM (#9313560)
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Custard ( 587661 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:03AM (#9313663) Homepage Journal
      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.
    • The fiber will last 20 -50 years.
      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)

      by millahtime ( 710421 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:05AM (#9313676) Homepage Journal
      And no one will ever need more than 640k.
    • 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.

      How do you inn

      • There already ARE a million monkeys hammering away on a million typewriters, and AOL is nothing like Shakespeare.

        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
    • 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.

      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)

      by Moderation abuser ( 184013 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:54AM (#9314128)
      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.

  • Just imagine the speeds they can share their mp3 collection at. I bet they are the next top target of the RIAA

  • *cough*kickback*cough* (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @07:53AM (#9313581) Homepage
    "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* (Score:4, Informative)

      by Zachary Kessin ( 1372 ) <zkessin@gmail.com> on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:15AM (#9313754) Homepage Journal
      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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ALecs ( 118703 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:20AM (#9313798) Homepage
      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. :)

      • Actually, I think my theory is still valid. I mean, I'm sure the university got some sort of deal for allowing the IBM/Apple shop to be on your campus. I mean, if its on campus and provides incentives for people to have those brands of computers (ie. simple repairs, bulk discounts), I would be almost certain that the company would pay the university something for that, or arrange some other type of deal.

        So yes, it MAY be convenient for repairs, but I don't see how there ISN'T some partnership type deal go

  • what a waste (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hb253 ( 764272 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @07:54AM (#9313582)
    Ridiculous overkill. How about putting the money towards lowering sky high tuition costs?

    • Re:what a waste (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Dachannien ( 617929 )
      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.

  • Couple of questions (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Xugumad ( 39311 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @07:54AM (#9313588)
    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.
    • There are seveal reasons to use fiber. It takes up less conduit space, it's tougher for the students to tap into and randomly splice in stupid things like telephones, the switches often support superior levels of router control, and the superior bandwidth offers greater flexibility for both dorm use and lab use, especially for backup and PXE baed network re-installations. MIT, for example, reloads the OS on its workstations every time you reboot them. That sort of thing takes serious bandwidth. Better to
    • In particular, if you divide their bandwidth to the Internet, by the number of students, I bet you get a lot less than gigabit.

      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.
    • Why Fiber?

      Simple: The network also easily carries the phone and all TV signals. No further cabling needed.

      (I've been at Case.)

    • In particular, if you divide their bandwidth to the Internet

      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)

    by AppyPappy ( 64817 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @07:55AM (#9313589)
    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.

  • Minimum my ass (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Those specs for minimum requirements are more like "according to our crtact with Dell/Apple..." I think you'd be fine without a flat panel monitor, screaming processor, and the 3-year warranty. As a college student, I'm not made of money, as I'm sure the students at this school aren't either. There is no reason a much less powerful can't connect to their system, maybe I'd be happy with a simple 20GB HDD instead of having 80GB to stash my pirated movies/music...

  • What about laptops? (Score:2, Informative)

    by TellarHK ( 159748 )
    I know this would be the first problem that came to mind for me. How will people be forced to deal with the problem that there's probably not a single laptop out there that has fiber gigabit in it? Of course, my Powerbook has gigabit copper on it, as does my recently upgraded motherboard. So there're two gigabit units that wouldn't be able to work here. There's a time and place where backwards compatibility has to be maintained, and most certainly a time to ditch it. It seems to me that we're about a d

  • Um... about that Yahoo survey... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @07:57AM (#9313610)
    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.
  • shouldn't all you need be a fiber gigabit NIC and the proper fiber SC or ST (depending on what they use) patch cable?
    • For more than one computer, it would be cheaper and simpler to use the media converter with a copper gigabit switch and NICs for local distribution. Plus, I can buy copper gigabit hardware and cabling off the shelf at COMPUSA. I've yet to see fiber based products in any local stores.
  • How long before someone at the RIAA connects the dots and realizes that Case Western Reserve University's high-bandwidth intranet is a target rich environment for subpoenas and potential lawsuits against file-sharers allegedly infringing on their members' copyrights?

    It's not like they require the song sharing to take place over the internet in order to go after people...

  • CWRU has had its fiber network since the 1980's or early 90's at the latest. I imagine they've probably gone through some expansion and upgrading in the intervening years, but back when I was looking at colleges this was one of the features they touted highly during the campus tour.

  • Case adminstration... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The fiber gig network isn't good for anything but downloading porn from the guy down the hall. For awhile now Case has paid for a 45 mbit outbound connection, but the provider never actually enforced the cap. They started enforcing it towards the end of the spring semester and everything slowed to a crawl. Gig is great, but before I left campus for summer I never got more than a few kbit for most downloads.

  • Really Old News (16 years old) (Score:5, Informative)

    by regen ( 124808 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:07AM (#9313688) Homepage Journal
    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? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Beowulf_Boy ( 239340 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:08AM (#9313695)
    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.

  • The one drawback is (Score:3, Funny)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:08AM (#9313696)
    they spent so much money on the fibre all the servers are hand me down Sinclair ZX81's.

  • University of Delaware (Score:4, Informative)

    by The-Bus ( 138060 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:09AM (#9313699)
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by joib ( 70841 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:26AM (#9313850)

      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.
      • Most of the smartest and most learned people I know in tech fields picked up the bulk of their expertise from personal projects, not academic curricula.

        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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:11AM (#9313720)
    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?! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dachannien ( 617929 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:12AM (#9313732)
    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.

  • I'm curious if it will even be used (Score:3, Interesting)

    by digitalgimpus ( 468277 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:14AM (#9313749) Homepage
    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.

    • Labor Costs (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Detritus ( 11846 )
      If you look at hardware and labor costs, gigabit Ethernet is cost-effective for new installations. Installing 100base-t is not going to save much money on the hardware and it will be obsolete at an earlier date. Fiber has higher termination costs but it should have a longer useful lifetime than twisted-pair.

  • Not a good education (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:15AM (#9313752)
    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 went to Case from 1966-1970. Back then, they offered a good, solid engineering education, but they were already in decline. Case was the only school ever kicked off the ARPAnet. They had an ARPAnet connection in the late 1960s and lost it because they didn't perform on some contracts.

      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

    • I went to CWRU for Physics, Class of 1993. It was great -- IMHO the physics classes were uniformly good, with but a single exception. (Hey, one can't win them all.)

      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

  • I've seen a lot of overreacting here (Score:4, Insightful)

    by magefile ( 776388 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:22AM (#9313816)
    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.
  • My first thought was, well, it's important for regularity, so by all means, Fiber To The Dorms!

    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)

    by pedantic bore ( 740196 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:24AM (#9313837)
    This network is very expensive for the students to use. Their cheapest option for someone with an existing PC is $188.11 (NetGear GA621), which won't work on their home DSL/Broadband/whatever network when they're on break. The option for laptops (a better option for students, IMHO) is to get the adapter gizmo for $216.50 (NetGear GC102). Given that very decent desktops are $600 and laptops $1000, this means that they're increasing the price of these computers by >20%. Ouch.

    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)

    by Rufus211 ( 221883 ) <rufus-slashdot@@@hackish...org> on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:40AM (#9313970) Homepage
    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).

  • like 18 years ago at Stanford (Score:3, Informative)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:41AM (#9313976)
    Fiber ethernet nstalled in 1986.

  • Argh. Explanation (Score:5, Informative)

    by sinnergy ( 4787 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @09:50AM (#9314732) Homepage
    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.

  • Pearl Harbor and CASE (Score:3, Informative)

    by kyoko21 ( 198413 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @10:38AM (#9315265)
    I am not sure why ATM sucked so bad at CASE but the ATM network deployed at Pearl Harbor works great (155Mbit to the desktop even with 300MHz P2). Tons and tons and tons of fiber all around the base and everything runs great. They even provide a few of the popular cable news network feeds over this ATM network such as FOX, CNN, Bloomber, and I think a few others that I can't recall. The only copper drop that was around was for the analog phones. In fact, even a year ago you would probablly still have a hard time trying to find a cat-5 drop. Keeps people from 'hooking' un-authorized equipment (personal systems) into the network so less chance for an outside contamination. Too bad now they are moving over to ethernet and no more on-demand video. *sigh*

  • Not new (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kundor ( 757951 ) <.kundor. .at. .member.fsf.org.> on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @10:38AM (#9315271) Homepage
    What the hell? Case has had fiber to the dorm room for about 15 years now.

  • Money Not Well Spent (Score:5, Interesting)

    by abonventre ( 784938 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @10:42AM (#9315332)
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ianbnet ( 214952 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @11:18AM (#9315687)
    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.

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