5 Colleges and 53 Miles of Fiber-Optic Cable

As the new millennium approached, the future of the Internet at Smith College appeared a little, well, apocalyptic.

The college projected that its need for bandwidth, or network capacity, would grow exponentially in the coming years, in part because faculty members wanted to share large amounts of data more efficiently with their fellow researchers. But the cost of increasing its bandwidth would bust the college's budget. The cost was prohibitive because Smith, nestled in the rural

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