Journal

This photograph, and the article quoted in its entirety below inspired me to write Arizona Fish Story : A Life Less Serious last year. I wanted to post it here so that I had a copy of it for my own records.

May 5, 1997
From: Arizona Daily Star
Section: STAR TECH
Page: 8D

Wiring the UA: Dorm dwellers get super-high-speed access to Intenet

Mitch Gitman

How's this for a study in contrast?

On the one hand, you have the kind of super-high-speed Internet access that typically would cost someone hundreds of dollars a month and a heap of hassle to bring into a home.

On the other hand, you have, outside of a tent at summer camp, the humblest living quarters many Americans will occupy in their lifetimes: a cramped college dorm room.

Imagine then combining those two contrary conditions.

What you would get actually is life for 1,500 students in the University of Arizona residence halls. But here's the kicker: Those students are getting that Ferrari-fast Internet access at virtually no additional cost.

Through the university's nearly 2-year-old ResComp (residential computing) network, ``The folks in the residence halls have as good a connectivity as anybody else on campus, any other faculty or staff person,'' said Ted Frohling, systems programmer principal in the university telecommunications department over the campus voice and data networks.

At the same time, ResComp has opened a veritable Pandora's hard drive of controversy over the distribution of software, music and sexually explicit materials.

Wires without a cause

Really, ResComp owes its existence to some fortunate foresight.

In 1989, the entire campus's telephone system was rewired, essentially so the university could become its own phone company, Frohling said. At the same time that the copper wire for phone was installed, a higher-quality copper wire for data was installed.

``We were looking at the long term, realizing that we were going to need data connectivity in areas that didn't have it before,'' Frohling explained. As long as the buildings were being rewired anyway for phone, ``It didn't take any more time to pull two wires into a jack in a wall than one.''

It wasn't until the spring 1995 semester, until the Internet had begun to gain mass popularity, that administration saw the need for data lines to student rooms.

That summer, with the wires already in place in the rooms, the department of residence life spent about $800,000 to put the necessary switches and routers in 15 of the 17 residence halls, and to put two data ports - one per roommate, two per receptacle - in every room. Meanwhile, the university's Center for Computing and Information Technology (CCIT) strung out fiber-optic data lines to the dorms. By the fall semester, ResComp was ready to run.

C.A.T.S., the technology center of the university bookstore, agreed to handle the business side, selling students the installation and the necessary hardware, which is nothing more than an adapter card for an ``Ethernet'' computer network.

C.A.T.S. sells about a dozen models of Ethernet card, priced from $27 to $100. To have a technician come to your room and install the card costs $34.95 if you have a PC, $24.95 for Macintosh.

Of course, you already have to have the computer. But other than that, ResComp is free.

Raisons de ResComp

Students list many benefits to being on ResComp, most of which can be summed up in one word: convenience.

The main convenience is speed.

On a standard Ethernet, which transmits data at the rate of 10 megabits per seconds, a powerful enough computer hypothetically could download data 298 times faster than it could with a 33.6 kilobits-per-second modem that dials into the Internet.

Practically speaking as you get out on the Internet, the performance difference isn't nearly so great. But Gordon Lyon, a second-year computer science major, remembers taking 31 hours to download some software on a 14.4 kbps modem; on ResComp, he said, he can load in the same software in less than five minutes.

Having your own data port is the second part of the convenience equation.

In the UA residence halls, each room has one free active phone line and one that has to be activated for a fee.

Without ResComp, said senior geology major Michael Lane, if he had gotten that second line turned on for computer use (so he wouldn't be tying up the regular phone line), he would still have had to share it with his roommate, who also has a computer.

Now granted there are computer labs throughout campus, even at some of the residence halls, where students can get just the same high-bandwidth Ethernet connections.

Andrea Marconi, a freshman political science student, could just walk downstairs and use the computer lab at the Yavapai honors hall where she stays. And yet, Marconi can reel off a whole list of advantages that ResComp has over the labs: she can use her own equipment anytime day or night, she can rely on her own equipment to work.

And ``I don't have to go to a computing commons on-campus like a lot of other people do. I have (a computer) just right at my fingertips,'' she said.

``My computer's always there when I need it and the computer labs generally get full, especially during finals time when people are writing papers.''

Plus, there's the convenience of being able to use your own software and settings and being able to download online information directly to your own computer.

Yet, with the comforts of ResComp also come some troubles.

When sharing isn't caring

On Feb. 25, all ResComp users received in their e-mail boxes a stern message composed by Steve Gilmore, the assistant director of residence life and ResComp network administrator.

``PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING AS IT IS THE ONLY WARNING THAT WILL BE ISSUED,'' the message began. ``FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL RESULT IN DISCIPLINARY ACTION AND POSSIBLE PROSECUTION.''

Really, it's a warning Gilmore would never have had to write if ResComp didn't work so well.

With a local area network (LAN) like ResComp, sharing files with other computers on the network is easy. With Windows 95 on a LAN, sharing files is ridiculously easy.

One morning this February, Gilmore went surfing on ResComp's Windows 95 ``Network Neighborhood.''

``And it got interesting real quick,'' he said. ''I would say that as I was scanning around the network, I would hit on something about every fourth or fifth machine that I went to.''

Among the ``somethings'' he found being openly shared were Microsoft Office Professional, Adobe Pagemaker, Photoshop and Illustrator, and Corel Office Suite with WordPerfect. Meaning, students were distributing for free software that would cost hundreds of dollars in stores.

``THIS IS A VIOLATION OF FEDERAL COPYRIGHT LAW,'' Gilmore wrote in what was, to be fair, a mostly uncapitalized letter.

In addition, he found on the network what he described in the message as ``pornographic pictures, images and movies.''

Besides the legal concerns again with copyright and with making adult materials readily available to minors, Gilmore told ResCompers that openly posting porn was a violation of Residence Life ``community standards.''

Conclusion: Gilmore asked that copyright materials be unshared immediately and pornographic material at least be password-protected immediately.

Result: ``It was amazing how quickly stuff disappeared,'' he said.

That doesn't mean Gilmore's notice was well-received.

Graham Ollis, a sophomore computer science major, didn't like the way he thinks Gilmore lumped all commercial software together, not distinguishing between retail software that you have to buy to use and shareware that you can try before you buy, not to mention freeware.

``I didn't appreciate the way (Residence Life) oversimplified the way software companies work,'' Ollis said.

Bob Ostrander, president of the Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP), an international trade organization, confirmed that almost all shareware publishers not only permit second-hand distribution of their products, they encourage it.

However, Ostrander cautioned, putting a shareware program on a LAN so that people can run the program without downloading it to their own machines typically requires purchase of a multi-site license. ``You would not expect that each individual user would be paying for the software if they're using it because they're expecting that things on the LAN are usable.''

Gilmore said he was aware of numerous other complaints of Residence Life ''censorship'' in the wake of his letter.

Even then, there remains another filesharing issue in the ResComp neighborhood.

While individuals interviewed for this article said that copyright applications and adult content are not easily found on ResComp today, they also said there still are plenty of digitized musical recordings - especially recordings in the compact disc-quality MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 format, commonly misnamed MPEG-3.

Graham Ollis recalled someone sharing on ResComp all the tracks on the new U2 album, POP, converted into MPEG files. And he knows someone who is running out of space on his hard drive because he is downloading so many MPEG files from the Internet and ResComp.

Ollis himself decided not to bother with the files because of the extraordinary demands that playing them makes on even the fastest PC processors.

Jeremy Pinson, one of two students employed part-time to manage ResComp, said there are no current plans to crack down on MPEG audio files. ``We've been curious on the legality of those,'' he reported, adding, ``I probably would say it's not (legal).''

And yet even Steve Gilmore speaks of the positives of ResComp filesharing, giving the example of a resident who makes his or her printer available online to printer-less neighbors.

To Ethernet or not?

So is ResComp itself such a positive that it actually influences people to stay in the dorms?

At the end of last school year, ResComp's first year, 20 percent of eligible dorm dwellers had signed up for ResComp. As of March 4, 1,493 of the 4,120 residents of the 15 wired halls, or 36 percent, were on ResComp.

Those acceptance rates far surpass Residence Life expectations based on other universities' experiences with residential computing networks, Gilmore said. UA Web-site manager Brett Bendickson credits ResComp with the UA's 14th-place ranking on a list of ``America's 100 Most Wired Colleges'' in the May issue of the magazine Yahoo Internet Life.

However, Gilmore said, the critical stat is ResComp's resident return rate.

Upper-class returnees get priority over incoming freshmen for rooms. Already, some freshmen in effect have to be turned away for space. If ResComp really becomes a draw, it could crowd out even more freshmen, Gilmore said.

So far, that isn't happening. In recent years, that rate has remained around 30 percent to 35 percent, according to Gilmore. He won't know until June about the 1997-98 school year's residence hall population.

Nonetheless, there are quite a few students who say ResComp has been a factor in their deciding to extend their stay in the dorms.

Tyler Parsons, a sophomore media arts major, for one is planning to stay in the same room in Graham-Greenlee Hall for the third straight year: ``Because the networking is just too good to pass up. I just can't turn down a 10 megabit-per-second Ethernet connection free. If I were paying, it might be a different matter.''

Still, even some heavy ResComp users don't see the network as enough of an attraction to make up for the detractions.

Alec Kosky, a junior computer science student, has a Sun SPARCstation publishing material on the Internet through ResComp.

But sitting in the tiny room he shares in Kaibab-Huachuca Hall, said he wants to live in an apartment next school year. His reason: ``Privacy.''

Photo by Linda Seeger Salazar, The Arizona Daily Star

Graham Ollis, a sophomore, can brush his teeth while surfing the Net in the comfort of his dorm room. Page 1D.

Photos by James S. Wood, The Arizona Daily Star

Ted Frohling examines super-high-speed Internet connection switching box

Brian Rolston, a senior, plays Internet game is his room, using the ResComp connection.

The ResComp network gives UA students super-high-speed Internet access in their rooms.

Computer folder shows musical recordings in high-quality MPEG-3 format being openly shared by a student on the dorm network, despite copyright laws that ban such activity.

Illustration by Judy Margolis, The Arizona Daily Star

Bringing the world to your room

Chart by The Arizona Daily Star

Wired dorms' usage rates as of March 4