Higher Learning at Warp Speed
If going online with your home computer is like turning on the tap for a glass of water, getting on the Internet this fall at Case Western Reserve University is going to be like opening a fire hydrant.
In all, 16,000 computers, including machines in every dorm room, will be capable of being linked over the coming year to a fiber-optic network that delivers data at up to 1 gigabit per second.
That’s about a thousand times faster than the typical home broadband connection--so fast that the research university’s computer mavens still don’t know exactly what they’ll do with so much bandwidth.
And that’s the point of this $27-million investment: Case will look to develop applications that benefit from a supercharged Internet.
With the new system, “You can actually do full-screen, full-motion, high-definition video with high-definition sound,” said the school’s technology chief, Lev Gonick. “That’s pretty amazing when you think about research science.”
Medical students will be able to watch surgery in real time from a remote location yet experience it as if they were in the room.
A musician in Cleveland could study with a teacher in, say, New York via an Internet audiovisual conference--provided the teacher had an equally fast connection.
“This is clearly one of the most aggressive if not the most aggressive deployments” of computer technology in academia, said Steve Corbato of Internet2, a national consortium of universities working on the next-generation Internet.
Corbato expects such so-called gigabit Ethernet technology to be common on university campuses within about two years.
For now, Case has got a leg up on such premier tech universities as Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon and Caltech, which offer only one-tenth of the speed at 100 megabits per second.
“Many universities are looking into gigabit networking on campus,” said Joel Smith, chief information officer at Carnegie Mellon. “They just proceed more rapidly or less rapidly, depending on funding and other concerns.”
Carnegie Mellon, like Case, was one of the first universities in the 1970s to experiment with networked computers. It has some gigabit-speed links between buildings and is constantly upgrading, Smith said.
And like many campuses, Carnegie Mellon offers wireless connectivity so students and professors can log in from anywhere.
“Rare is the university that can do this all at once,” Smith said.
John Dundas, Caltech’s director of information technology, said competitive pressures will force other universities to follow suit even though the technology at first will benefit a limited pool of graduate-level researchers.
“Until faculty are able to integrate these kind of technological innovations into their teaching, it’s not going to have a lot of impact on the undergrads,” he said.
Case Western, a 9,600-student university, contracted with Sprint and Cisco Systems for the upgrade. As part of the deal, Sprint can test new technologies at the school. In return, Case gets discounts on future technology upgrades.
The Case system will take about a year to complete, but it is already operating in several dorms.
