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The Internet

Students Seek Widespread Internet Access 81

Posted by michael from the sure-it's-for-homework dept.
Russ Jones writes "As a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we have been struggling with finding ways to provide internet access to our growing off-campus students - currently, students have few to no options other than traditional, expensive, commercial providers. After feeling out large contracts through the University with major providers, it has become clear that they do not want to play ball with a public institution. Regardless, as a student I am still very interested in finding a solution to at least some of the woes. Students at Carolina are required to purchase laptops, many of which are wireless enabled. The University has put a lot of funding into wireless initiatives (but has only looked into using short-distance access points). Are there any long distance alternatives, that could possibly stretch a mile or more in radius? Any ideas on possible alternatives?"
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Students Seek Widespread Internet Access More

Students Seek Widespread Internet Access

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  • you go to a school that is not exactly a 2 year degree mill, but you cannot use google. I shall show you the way:

    Click Here [google.fr]. Choose the first link and read. I go to a shitty state school. It took you longer to write that bullshit Ask Slashdot than it would have to use a little common sense. Are you used to having things just handed to you?
    • Why use french google? And I believe his point of the article was to get outside opinion. As a UNC student myself, I've wondered about and have researched the topic. Chances are, the articles he'll find on long range wireless internet will not focus on being an alternative internet source for college students, so why not ask to see if any college students have any experience or opinions with this topic? Don't be a troll.
    • You're marked as a troll and they are the one asking the question. Go figure.

  • Students at Tufts University... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Ieshan ( 409693 ) <ieshan@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Wednesday April 03, 2002 @02:34AM (#3275458) Homepage Journal
    ...are faced with the same problem.

    In fact, I know a group of upcoming juniors who decided to not live off campus because of the internet connection - it's god aweful and hideously expensive.

    I'm not saying that the school should provide internet access to everyone, but really, some of the cases are ridiculous. Houses that have cabling running underneath and above them should be wired - if the house isn't rented to a Tufts student, charge a small fee for the service that you could work out with the provider of our lines, and if it is, provide free access.

    The 'net is Huge at schools now. Everyone's on it, even if computer literacy is still very below "techie". I think the schools really ought to do more to bring the net to their surrounding communities, especially in the case of off campus living.
    • In fact, I know a group of upcoming juniors who decided to not live off campus because of the internet connection - it's god aweful and hideously expensive.

      That's a major reason why there's a housing crunch at UMass. If I were a landlord renting a house to college students, I would get a DSL connection and set up a LAN, splitting the cost of the connection.

    • move off campus to get a nice roadrunner cable modem connection, as the school likes to muck with (read: terminate) connections on ports > 1024, which inhibits file sharing, mp3 streaming, and just about anything else that is useful or enjoyable.

  • Wavelan + Yagi antennas (Score:2, Insightful)

    by JM ( 18663 )
    I installed this stuff back in '95, at the time it was still 2Mbps, but the range was 8km.

    I don't see why recent access points couldn't do it.
  • from places like Time Warner Cable and students can get DSL from Verizon. Again, both in your area. Not good options but at least you have options. Where I am I can't get broadband... period. It sounds like you are complaining because you can't get broadband for free from your school.

    Another poster insightfully gave you a Google link that you should use for your wireless dream. I suggest that since your school is dictating that students have laptops and certain kinds of laptops (and I assume the school doesn't pay for the laptops) why not dictate that students also have internet access and pay for it themselves? Really, we are talking about $14.95 for dial-up or $50 per month for broadband compared to a $1400 laptop they already have to buy.
    • Let's see typical 5 years for CS program, 9 months * 5 years * $50 = $2,500 or almost twice what the laptop cost, hmm does seem he has a point. Or about 2 million servings of raman noodles, or a complete entertainment system, etc. Fact is college students have better things to spend their money on. Besides the university can by buying bandwidth in large quantities gets a hell of a discount, and they can redistribute it without worrying about margins.
      • To make my veiled sarcasm plain: I don't like the fact that UNC forces students to buy laptops. I don't like the fact that because the students now all have laptops they have to have broadband. I think students who wouldn't have bought broadband anyhow probably would rather buy the Ramen Noodles. I don't really want UNC to force its students to buy broadband (even at reduced prices) because it has some kind of shady deal with a telco.

        Reality should intervene at some point here and force people to realize that if kids today go to college without a laptop and don't get internet access on their own... They have much bigger problems than being able to download pdf's! They are having problems just getting to go to college to begin with!

        Don't give me sob stories about kids going to a college that is practically Ivy Leauge.

  • what my school does (Score:3, Informative)

    by toast0 ( 63707 ) <slashdotinducedspam@enslaves.us> on Wednesday April 03, 2002 @04:31AM (#3275707)
    my school has ethernet plugs in the dorms, and in most classrooms, and a lot of the 'public areas' (the student center, library etc), and both a local number and a toll free number (not well documented, but a google search finds it), with ppp support.

    I'm moving off campus for the next school year, and if I don't have funding for a cable modem or dsl, using the ppp (which i imagine only runs at 28.8 or so) will be fine. Any downloads I need to do can be done while on campus.

    I'm going to do my best to find a home on campus for my 'desktop' with the debian mirror on it though, cause updating the mirror on a modem would be sad :)

    I don't know how many students UNC has that would be using dialin lines, but they could start w/ a couple lines and grow as need be... could probably find some used modem racks fairly cheap, especially if 56k isn't important

    • UNC System schools... as far as I know, phased out dialup access about a year ago. UNCG turned their dialup system off mid-summer last year.
      • Actually, if you dont mind using lynx you can still dial up through unc for free(even if you are not a student). It is kind of convoluted but Email me [mailto] and I will walk you through it.
        • Back when I was in high school, a medical school thought it would be a good idea to give accounts to high school comp sci students... well.. they had a dialup setup plugged directly into the system.... basiclly, people installed slirp onto the system, and there would be like six people logged into the box surfing the internet... it was pritty sad.

  • possible solution (Score:3, Interesting)

    by oo7tushar ( 311912 ) <slash.@tushar.cx> on Wednesday April 03, 2002 @04:42AM (#3275726) Homepage
    If this is going to be a student initiative a wireless/ethernet combination is a g00d idea. You could have several computers close to campus communicating with a wireless network. These computers would act as the 'middlemen' between the the school and external machines. You'd hook up to these machines through cables and would patch that into another set of machines and so on. Problem is that it's expensive and hard to setup.

    Another solution is dialup...but that limits you in speed. If you school is willing to jump through loop holes (regulations is all), you can setup your own DSL: info here [pbs.org]. The cost to setup can initially be covered by the school and you can rent the modems to the students. A small fee to use the line can also be included in the rental charge.

    Here at the University of Waterloo (www.uwaterloo.ca) the Residences have account quotas so that people don't download movies 24/7. Investigation into how you could do that would also be worthwhile, or just keeping track of how much a specific computer downloads (just to give people warnings).
    • For the past two or three years, CMU has been providing DSL service (for around $400/semester for my 1500/90 connection). For that, we get a connection that is routed directly into the machine room and is great for talking to campus machines remotely.

      They have stopped pushing the phaseout back and it will die a horrible death on May 31. It cost too much, was too much of a drain on the technical support on campus and did not get the technical support they wanted on a timely basis from Verizon. AFAIK, this used a lot of verizon equipment and was a complete hassle. I think that rolling your own DSL would be even worse, because you're depending on a service that the phone company would fight tooth and nail to not provide and is basically sucking money from a service they could profit from.
  • Here in Odense (Denmark) we have achieved getting allmost every dorm online by creating our own network http://odense.kollegienet.dk - sorry it's danish only. By using fiber at short distances (below 1km) and leased lines with 2mbit rad modem more than 20 dorms (ranging in sizes from 30 to 560 residents) in the city has been connected to the university which provides internet access. Everybody pays the equivalent of ~3$ a month. If you can find some people wiling to do some volunteer work you can do it yourself, it takes some planning but i believe it has been woth it.

  • NCREN or UNC-CH? (Score:4, Informative)

    by LWolenczak ( 10527 ) <julia@evilcow.org> on Wednesday April 03, 2002 @08:56AM (#3276224) Homepage Journal
    Have you talked to NCREN or the university?

    A dry copper loop is what? 30 bucks a month... and two dsl pipes are maybe 50-60 bucks on ebay... it would be easy to put up a 2.1 or a 1.5 mbit connection.

    And don't say there are not enough ip addresses. UNC-G has a class B.... I'm willing to bet CH has a class b also.
    • I dont think NCREN would be willing to give access to folks off-campus. They have really strict rules as to what organizations get pipes, and the pipes they do give are really fat.

      At Appalachian State, where there is an oligopoly of apartment management, a company called appstate.net has set up contracts with the apartment managers in town to put in 1.5 Mbit ADSL lines to the apartment buildings (1 per building). They then split it off with high-gain 802.11b WAPs. I think it works pretty well, and it is cheap, but they set a 30 GB limit per month. On the other hand, cablemodem access is only 19.95/mo from Charter cable. As long as UNC has a budget crisis, they are not going to fork out the dough for off-campus access.
      • Hey matt.... You don't call, you don't email me back. You never returned that redhat 6 disk :)

        I'm still in k'ville... working in gso right now... btw, i war drove kville... interresting results... drop me a line at my office. BTW, if you need a job when you finally get out of college, I can hook ya up.

        I am aware of NCREN's policys regarding connections... I personally think NCREN and ITS need to be gotten rid of and redone. One of my customers is a Community College near gso, and they have a hell of a time getting changes made to their checkpoint that is managed by ITS. The only info you can get out of ITS is how some things are natted, and how some of the port forwarding is done, but one could get more info with something like iptables -L on a linux firewall then what they provide to the Community College. Rumor has it that NCREN gave a pipe to Microsoft's Support/Sales group in charlotte... It's rumored to be a oc3....

        -
        Justin

        at

        wss.net
    • This sounds great, but just try getting a local telco to sell you a dry pair. Unless you're an alarm company, they'll do their best to give you the runaround.
  • Who knows? That might be the best way out. Sprint PCS could even pick up a nice tax break, get more wireless and ads in your area, and would be nice PR for both.


    Other than 3G, I wouldn't do "long distance" wireless, because of scalability issues.

  • WiFi (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SerialHistorian ( 565638 ) on Wednesday April 03, 2002 @01:19PM (#3277722)
    There's a guy who lives on the big island of Hawaii and has managed to set up antennas to run 802.11b to selected areas of the island. I'm trying to find the article, but I can't... it was linked here on /. a number of weeks ago. Also, the city of Yakima, WA is mostly wired with 802.11b, according to the sysadmin at my company, who set the system up. Quite possibly, using a network of directional antennas, a few tall buildings, and inexpensive local access points, you can set up relatively good public 802.11b network that would serve the needs of most students. The best way to do the local access points would be to set up an omnidirectional rebroadcast relay. From previous reading and no practical experience, it seems that this could simply be a cheap box running linux (even a low-end pentium will work...) with a cheap (can be home-made, I think) directional receiver and a omnidirectional antenna (just a regular 802.11b card will work) and some software to glue the two together. Can someone else provide accurate technical details? I'll admit that networking is really my weak area.
    • BTW, I realize that this would probably cost more than the $50/mo for cable access split between a couple of roommates. But if you make sell the rebroadcast relays as a student business, it turns into a capital investment rather than the expense on the part of the students, because as long as the network is running, you can re-sell the relays to other students and retain at least a part of your investment.

      Investment GOOOOOD. Throwing money at AT&T or whomever BAAAAAAD.

    • For a private person to do this is ok, but for a institution to do it is abslutely stupid.

      According to the FCC, nearly all modifications to 802.11b base stations is illegal. To get it to transmit date far enough (spec is 300 feet) requires quite a bit of power, and that power starts to transmit serious amounts of interference. 802.11b is legal only because the spec says that it has to accept all interference, and provide none. If you were to set up a network using multiple base stations that have been modified, and cause noticable interference, the FCC will come to investigate.

      Then the school is screwed, and so are the students.
  • Our school provides laptops to students as part of their tuition. That way everyone gets one and the cost of the laptop can be included in the financial aid package. Perhaps your school could do something similar with the internet access? I'm sure on campus people pay a fee that goes towards internet access, if you paid the same fee and lived off campus perhaps they could get a group discount or something by paying for the access themselves in bulk and them allocating it to you? I don't know. Purely speculation.

  • Off campus apartments... SHARE INTERNET (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Really, how hard is it? During all the time I lived off campus at UNC, we subscribed to either DSL or Cable (depending upon availability) and shared the connection. You could use wireless today, but we just ran cat-5 (wireless used to be expensive, you know). We built a POS single disk linux router and bought a cheap hub. Today, just buy a cheap home router or a cheap home router / WAP. When you distribute the cost of cable or DSL across 6 or more people it gets pretty cheap.

    While extending 802.11b with antennas over a mile should not be difficult, you are going to run into difficulties with all the trees and hills in Chapel Hill. Get your roommates/neighbors together, bite the bullet and order DSL/cable (you can even get it in Carrboro). If you can round up a few collaborators you are looking at less than $10 per month apiece. It's only costing you about a beer a week (uptown anyhow) at that point, so get over it.
  • Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA, has worked with city leaders to install 10Mbs Ethernet connections throughout the entire city. If you want to find a plan that will provide fast, inexpensive connectivity to the entire community (including students living off campus), I'd start poking around at www.bev.net [bev.net], especially the BEV Digital Library [bev.net], which tells you exactly how to plan and implement such a system.

  • 24hr computer labs (Score:1, Interesting)

    by cybercrap ( 319182 )
    Why the hell would they need to offer broadband to everybody and their mother at home? Just have some computer labs open 24hrs. It is way cheaper, and they can make sure you aren't d/l porn or warez or mp3s. Sure that takes all the fun out of it, but if you want that shit, you gotta pay to play. My university has a few 24hr computer labs, and our making more and more open 24hrs. Also, who the hell would want to share bandwidth with the university? You would be the lowest priority when it comes to bandwidth, and I'm sure during 9-5pm it would be slower than all hell.

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