Friday, March 29, 2002

Case Western Begins $25-Million Project to Put Fast Connections on Every Desktop By FLORENCE OLSEN Case Western Reserve University has begun a $25-million project to build a data, video, and voice network that will be 10 times as fast as most campus networks. The effort, which entails innovative financing arrangements as well as the latest network hardware, will give every computer on the university's campus a connection that moves a billion bits of data per second. The university network already runs on fiber-optic cable -- some 5,000 miles of it -- so most of the $25-million will be spent on such components as routers, switches, and network cards. The infrastructure project, which could take as long as 18 months to complete, involves establishing 17,000 gigabit-Ethernet-over-fiber connections in 87 buildings across the university's 150-acre campus. The project will proceed in phases, beginning with a new classroom building designed by the architect Frank O. Gehry that will open in May. Dormitories and Greek houses near the campus will have the gigabit-Ethernet connections in place when students return in the fall. The plan also calls for campuswide wireless-network coverage and for widespread use of desktop video. The university will install 800 "Buckeye" wireless-access points and 2,500 desktop video cameras across the campus to serve its 9,600 students. Financing for the new infrastructure will come from several sources, including a technology fund set up by Sprint, which won the contract to do the upgrade with a subcontractor, Cisco Systems. The technology fund will help the university pay for future technology upgrades. Sprint will put 10 cents of every dollar it receives under the five-year contract into a fund that Sprint and Case Western will jointly administer. Money from the fund can be used for buying additional network equipment and services through Sprint. The fund is an attempt to deal with one of the big challenges in managing technology in higher education, which "is that technology is almost never seen as a recurring investment," says Lev S. Gonick, vice president for information services at Case Western. David L. Smallen, vice president for information technology at Hamilton College, in New York, says that the fund "is an interesting idea" for financing a large capital expenditure -- especially given the unstable market in which telecommunications companies are operating. Mr. Gonick says the Sprint contract will help the university -- and other nearby arts and educational institutions -- buy wireless equipment, digital-phone service, and high-speed Internet bandwidth through Sprint. The university's affiliates, which include the nearby Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland Institute of Music, and the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, will be eligible to buy switching gear and wireless-access points at the discounted prices the university negotiated. High-speed electronics, together with the university's extensive fiber-optic infrastructure, "will enable these 19th-century institutions to become origination sites for 21st-century learning and cultural education," Mr. Gonick says. Other sources of financing for the $25-million campus project are the university budget and a new $400 annual fee that students in the dormitories and Greek houses will pay. At that rate, campus officials say, the investment in faster residential-network connections will pay for itself in seven years. Mr. Gonick estimates that more than a third of the computers on the Cleveland campus have processors that are fast enough to keep pace with the speed of the new network. Many of those computers are in biotechnology, medical, and engineering labs, he says. The fast desktop connections will be matched by a high-speed network backbone, with the fastest switches connecting 18 buildings on campus at speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second. Case Western will use its network for dozens of science, engineering, and medical applications, Mr. Gonick says. "Imagine the ability to stream dozens of simultaneous channels of high-definition television, or to do real-time simulations for computational neurology in three dimensions." Researchers will be able to do all of those things using the new infrastructure, he says. Nearly a decade has passed since the university purchased enough fiber-optic cable to connect the campus with 45 institutions known collectively as Cleveland's University Circle. "That's rightly been seen as having been a strategic investment," Mr. Gonick says. In this latest project, the university has taken what Mr. Gonick says is a strategic next step. One potential wireless application would send students pager or cell-phone alerts when their laundry cycles were finished so they would not spend their evenings hanging out in laundry rooms. "It's not an educational application, but it's an example of what [the students] are looking at," says Mark Brunn, a general manager at Sprint. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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