By the fall semester 1999, all 5,400 students at the University of Colorado at Boulder who live in residence halls will have their own high-speed computer connections, allowing them to download reference and educational material quickly from around the world on their personal computers.
At the start of the fall 1998 semester, 1,800 residence hall students already were plugged into 100 megabit Ethernet connections and 4,000 more students will be connected by late January, according to Dennis Maloney, director of telecommunications. "CU-Boulder is believed to be the only university in the nation that is providing this level of data communications service to its residence halls," Maloney said.
"The advantage for students of having 100 megabit Ethernet connections to the Internet is that it's fast," Maloney said. "A student would be hard pressed to bring a personal computer to campus that would require anything faster than this.
"This is absolutely fantastic for students because it will enable them, for example, to download research material and access to library information that without this fast connection would be painfully slow."
According to Jeremy Law, a tri-executive with CU-Boulder聮s student government and a Residential Adviser in the Cheyenne Arapaho residence hall, the new Internet connection is "amazing."
"I think this is an amazing resource," Law said. "For academics, it聮s made it a lot easier to do research. I聮m more compelled to use the Internet now for academic pursuits and research. Before it was just too boring to sit and wait for information to download."
Law, a senior English-philosophy double major whose room in Cheyenne Arapaho was connected this fall, said for students the high-speed access "will be quite an enabling device. The convenience of this will be very beneficial to students."
Housing Director Carl Jardine said the new Internet connection is arriving in the residence halls at just the right time because of the growth of Internet use worldwide in the last two years.
"The level of service this will make available to students is hard to predict because the web and Internet services are changing so much," Jardine said. "But having this backbone in place will make students able to access a wide base of services that are available now and services that are being created that don't even exist now."
The program for wiring CU-Boulder's residence halls, called Residential Networking or ResNet, was a recommendation of the campus strategic plan and was approved for implementation last winter, Maloney said. By Jan. 1, residence hall connections will be available to 4,000 students with all 5,400 student connections in place by next September.
All residence halls except Williams Village and Family Housing are expected to be wired by late January. Modem access to the campus Internet system also is being increased by six times its current level, which will make quicker access for students dialing in from off-campus.
The 100-megabit connections are expected to keep students up-to-date for at least the next five years and possibly longer. An estimated 71 percent of students living in CU-Boulder's residence halls, about 3,800 of the 5,400 who are connected, currently bring their own computers to campus, Maloney said.
Completion of the ResNet project will "bring us up to speed with the top public universities in the country in terms of Internet access for residence hall users," Maloney said. The "top wired" campuses in the country are rated on factors such as numbers of students who register via the World Wide Web, faculty web page requirements and numbers of web courses, where CU-Boulder is still making improvements, he said.