Ethernet Is Changing Dorm Life

The proposed merger of America Online and Time Warner anticipates an age when high-speed Internet access is everything, a conduit for almost all of the entertainment, communications and information that people consume.

It is an era so distant to most Americans that they can hardly envision it. And yet it already exists. In fact, it is the only world that today’s college students know.

Colleges across the country have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years wiring dormitories for high-speed Internet access. The projects have been undertaken in the name of ushering the academic world into the Information Age. But in reality, colleges have done far more: They have created a cohort of consumers utterly addicted to the kinds of services and data delivery speeds that more and more companies have bet their futures on providing.

To call today’s students high-speed Internet users “is like saying ‘breathers of oxygen,’ ” said Scott Sander, whose online movie company, Sightsound.com, caters almost exclusively to college students. “We have this one generation where the parents have no clue and the kids know nothing else. It’s the biggest technological generation gap in history.”

Indeed, today’s students scoff at the ordinary Internet access most Americans know. They crave speed to such an extent that they base their housing decisions on it, restructure their meager student budgets to afford it, and refuse to attend any college that doesn’t offer it.

Consider the suffering they endure when they go home for break and have to plug their PCs into plain old phone lines that are hundreds of times slower.

“You go through ethernet withdrawal,” said George Lerdsuwanrut, a UCLA junior, referring to the campus network. “Your computer sits there and you don’t want to use it. You eventually find other things to do.”

“I can’t stand it,” said Thivantha Kurera, a sophomore at USC. “I just wait until I go back to school.”

The experience is so miserable, said Jerry Lin, a senior at Stanford University, “that I’ve been kind of scared about the prospect of leaving my ethernet connection when I graduate.”

College administrators acknowledge that academic pursuits account for just a fraction of the activity on their campus networks. The bulk of the traffic is made up of millions of packets of data containing music files, instant messages, toll-free phone calls, e-commerce orders, online games, bootleg movies and just about anything that can be broken down into bits.

High-Speed Lines Are the Key

It is almost impossible to overstate the role of technology in today’s college students’ lives. They were born about the time that IBM was rolling out its first PC. They learned to wield joysticks almost as soon as they learned to walk, and became teenagers just as the Internet was exploding in popularity.

But what truly separates them from other age groups--even from their older brothers and sisters--is that they entered college just as universities across the country were installing high-speed Internet lines in the dorms.

Marks Tower, a high-rise dorm at USC, has been housing underclassmen since the mid-1960s. But alumni would be bewildered by the technological environment that thrives there today.

Walk down the hallway on the eighth floor almost any time of day and you’re likely to hear students in separate rooms shouting at each other--”You killed me!”--as they mow each other down in online games played over the network.

Friends from opposite ends of the floor open their doors and stroll toward the elevators in eerie simultaneity because they just messaged each other by computer that it’s time to head off to the dining commons. To them, knocking on someone’s door is an antiquated 20th century tradition.

It’s not uncommon to find students talking on the phone, playing music on their PCs and sending instant messages at the same time. They are extreme devotees of ICQ, shorthand for a service called “I Seek You,” which allows people to trade messages across the hall or across an ocean as quickly as they can type.

“My friends ICQ me before they call me just to make sure I’m there,” said Kurera, a 19-year-old sophomore who took a job as residence hall advisor for the eighth floor so he could stay in the dorm--and keep his ethernet access.

“We live our lives over the Internet,” he said. “When we get out of school, cable modems or whatever the new technology is will be like telephone service. Everyone will need it.”

It is a Net-centric culture that amazes Kurera’s older brother, Devinda, who graduated from USC just last year, but moved out of the dorms before they were wired.

“When I came to college, e-mail was still fairly new for students,” he said. “I don’t do any Internet shopping. I wouldn’t even conceive of downloading MP3 [music files].” Spending time around his brother, he said, “I’m almost grateful I didn’t have ethernet access, because I wouldn’t be able to go back to a modem. It seems like once you go ethernet you can’t go back.”

Ivy League schools were among the first to wire dorms in the early 1990s. But the trend has spread to almost every four-year campus in the country in recent years. UCLA began offering high-speed access to all 6,500 on-campus residents in 1995. UC Irvine is scheduled to complete its installation of 6,000 on-campus lines this year. USC has installed about 4,000 lines and has 1,800 to go.

Jupiter Communications estimates that there are 2 million households with high-speed Internet connections now, but 7 million college students who have high-speed access either in the dorms or elsewhere on campus.

Colleges that don’t offer high-speed Internet access feel increasing pressure to catch up. Ohio State University, for instance, embarked on a crash course to install 10,000 high-speed Internet connections throughout its 49 dorm buildings last summer, largely because it feared losing students to better-equipped rivals.

“When admissions people go out and talk to students these days, the students always ask, “Do you have a [high-speed] network?’ ” said Valerie Shafer, director of information systems and services at Ohio State.

The changes have transformed academic life and made off-campus housing much less attractive. Today’s students register for classes, get their homework assignments, research papers and attend professors’ “virtual office hours” online. Stanford University and some others even post course lectures on the Net, so that students can review them any time they wish.

Of course, much of this can be accomplished with an ordinary modem, but tasks take far longer and simply connecting to the campus modem bank from outside can require a 45-minute wait. Although students in dorms often keep their Internet connection on 24 hours a day, students who dial in from off-campus are often restricted. At UC Irvine, for instance, students who dial in from off-campus are allotted just seven hours a week during “prime-time hours” that include weekday evenings.

New high-speed Internet services such as cable modems and digital subscriber lines are popular among students who live off-campus. But they are not yet available in most areas of the country, and often require expensive, long-term contracts that many students cannot afford. And besides, such services are still not as fast as ethernet.

Most college dorms these days provide 10-megabit-per-second ethernet connections, data lines that are about 200 times as fast as today’s fastest dial-up modems. Web pages load instantly, downloading even giant files such as movies takes minutes instead of hours, and the service is always on, meaning there is no delay waiting to connect.

Demand for dorm rooms has surged. At USC, for instance, 800 more students applied to stay on-campus this year than last year. UCLA, Boston College and dozens of other schools report similar statistics.

At Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, 75% of undergraduates live on campus. The university performs annual surveys asking dorm residents why they stay.

“The No. 1 reason,” said Tim Michael, director of housing services, “is their Internet connection.”

Only a few colleges can offer students space in the dorms beyond their first two years. At USC, for instance, many juniors and seniors live in university-owned buildings just off campus, some of which have not yet been wired.

“For a long time, students’ choices were based just on proximity to campus and cost,” said Ivan Wilson, manager of housing services at USC. “Now the wired rooms are selected first regardless of how close they are.”

Fraternity Row Adding Ethernet

The ethernet connections in dorms have become such a powerful draw that fraternities and sororities are spending thousands of dollars to wire their houses because they are increasingly having trouble persuading new members to move in.

The Alpha Phi sorority at UC Berkeley, for instance, spent $6,000 last summer to install high-speed Internet lines in every room of its three-story house. After the wiring project, the number of women seeking to join Alpha Phi surged to the highest level in its 98-year history.

“We realized we were competing with the dorms in rush,” said Jenny Michel, 21, president of the sorority. “The idea of moving into a room with three girls, one phone line and no Internet access didn’t tip the scale in our favor.”

Today’s teens and young adults are facile with technology long before they enter college. A recent survey of 16- to 22-year-olds by Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., found that 47% are online. They spend an average of nine hours a week signed on, compared to six hours for wired adults. Teens and young adults typically have at least three e-mail addresses, whereas most adults have just one. They are by far the most active users of chat rooms and instant messaging services.

But though they have grown up with the Net, their appetite for it changes dramatically when they move into the dorms and get a dose of speed.

“I remember before I came to college, I thought the Internet was a waste of time and really slow,” said Sean Checketts, a 21-year-old senior at UC Santa Barbara. After a few months in the dorms, he said, he was “almost an addict.”

The Net became, he said, an integral part of his everyday life. Not only did he use it for homework, online shopping and checking surf reports, but it also supplanted his television, his stereo and even his telephone. No longer did he make long-distance calls to his parents in Fresno, but instead set up their home computer so that he could have Web-based videoconferencing sessions with them for free.

His habits as a consumer have changed substantially. “I haven’t bought a music CD in four years,” he said. “I get all the latest songs off the Net.”

Like thousands of students, Checketts learned about MP3 in the dorms. MP3 is a data compression format that allows songs from CDs to be converted to small data files that can be traded across the Internet almost effortlessly. The practice often violates copyright laws but, to the chagrin of the music industry, it has proliferated wildly.

Wiring dorm rooms has been costly for universities. UCLA alone has spent about $7 million. Most projects are paid for by students in the form of additional fees spread out over a number of years. It usually amounts to about $100 per year for students.

“It’s a necessity at a higher institution of education in this day and age,” said Jim Craig, assistant vice chancellor of campus life at UC Irvine. “It’s part of the fabric of learning.”

It is also, at times, a major headache for administrators. Students take advantage of their high-speed connections for all sorts of extracurricular activities, some of which are illegal.

At Carnegie-Mellon last October, administrators performed a random search of the files 250 students had stored on the campus network. The administrators found that 71 students were storing illegal MP3 files, movies or copyrighted games and revoked their Internet access after the search.

At UCLA a few years ago, two students were arrested by the FBI for setting up their computers to distribute child pornography, a felony under federal law, said Michael Schilling, director of the information technology group at UCLA. Campus officials declined to reveal the students’ names or the outcome of the case.

Bootleg Music, Movies Proliferating

The most widespread problem, however, is the exploding popularity of MP3 files and bootleg movies. Just possessing such files is often a violation of copyright laws, but it is hard to find a student who expresses much concern about that.

“Everyone does it, everyone,” said Mugen Suzuki, a UC Irvine junior. “Mostly, that’s why students like the ethernet. It takes like seconds to download MP3s that take 15 minutes over a modem.”

The recording industry is engaged in what many consider a futile effort to crack down on the proliferation of illegal MP3s. UCLA, the University of Virginia and dozens of other colleges say that at least twice a week they are approached by the Recording Industry Assn. of America, asking administrators to shut down computers of students who set up their PCs to share MP3 files with others.

Most universities act on such requests by shutting down the student’s access, but rarely take additional disciplinary action, and almost never police campus networks themselves.

“We consider this an educational environment,” said Ken Poley, coordinator of the campus network at UC Santa Barbara. “If students need to learn lessons, they might as well learn them here.” Nevertheless, Poley said he is increasingly disillusioned. “We’re providing this great access,” he said, “and they’re sharing MP3s and movies.”

Students spend huge chunks of time online, and an increasing amount of money. Forrester’s recent survey showed that over a six-month period, young consumers spent an average of $332 on online purchases, about $35 more than adults who made online purchases averaged. Entire industries are being assembled with hopes of cashing in when these students graduate and start earning significant salaries.

Many experts believe that AOL’s main reason for buying Time Warner was to gain control of Time Warner’s large cable television infrastructure, which is gradually being converted into a system capable of delivering high-speed Internet service to the 13 million households it reaches. Today’s college students will fuel that demand.

In Hollywood, the entertainment industry is rapidly turning its attention to teens and young adults, half of whom report they watch less television because they spend so much time online, according to Forrester research.

DreamWorks SKG and Imagine Entertainment have combined to create a new Web site, www.pop.com, that will carry short films and animations mainly for a college-age audience. Time Warner recently launched a similar site, Entertaindom.com.

Another company, Sightsound.com, markets almost exclusively to college students because they are one of the few segments of the population with the high-speed Internet access necessary to download full-length movies.

“This fall we gave out 50,000 microwave popcorn packages with our company name on the bag to college students,” said Sander, the company’s co-founder. But that marketing focus will soon change as today’s students enter the work force.

“They will make their first apartment rental or home purchase decision based on bandwidth,” Sander said. “It’s like you’ve lived with indoor plumbing for four years. Now that you’ve graduated, are you going to go without?”