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COVER STORY

The Wired Campus
A web woven of fiberoptic cable

An X-ray of the Columbia campus would show that the familiar, red-brick buildings of Morningside Heights have sprouted not ivy, but a vast electronic circulatory system. What used to be basic electrical and phone wires threading through walls has become a web woven of miles of fiber-optic cable punctuated by intricate closet switchboxes.

Supporting one of the nation's fastest and most extensive campus networks takes a considerable amount of work behind the scenes and under the ground. But the effects are everywhere, from dorm room entertainment to library study to faculty research.

To start with, residence halls have been outfitted with one of the fastest connections in the country, according to Robert Cartolano, manager of academic technologies at Academic Information Systems (AcIS), the University's computing center. That means students can leaf through images in the digital Art Humanities collection, listen to the virtual tapes of Music Humanities or surf the Web at large without a lot of stalling for buffering and waiting for downloading.

Before last summer's upgrades, each building was sharing one 10 megabit connection. Now, "to every pillow there's a 10 megabit ethernet connection," says Alan Crosswell, director of network and computing systems at AcIS. That's about 100 to 200 times faster than the 56k modem one might use at home. "What residential bandwidth might look like in five years, that's what the students have now," Crosswell says.

Buildings are connected at gigabit speed, which means there are no bottlenecks on campus. In October, the connection speed between the University and the Internet was upgraded from 45 megabytes per second to 155 Mbps. For comparison, other leading schools are connecting at 24 Mbps.

The campus network is also being expanded to reach off-campus housing and faculty apartments.

Columbia, along with most major universities and government research centers, belongs to Internet2, a second, parallel Internet that is closed to the commercial traffic and casual surfers that clog the primary Internet. Internet2 is used for high-speed, high-quality, large transmissions.

Members can connect to one another's networks without going through the usual Internet gateways that cause delays. For instance, a Columbia student who wants to access a digital collection at Stanford can tap into Stanford at a speed that is almost as fast as using a computer at Stanford itself.

Last December, Columbia ran an experimental master class between the Manhattan School of Music and the University of Oklahoma School of Music. The MSM teachers and students came to Butler Library and were connected with students and teachers in Norman, Okla., via a bi-directional, high-speed Internet2 connection that had full-motion video and streaming audio on a full TV image. As a result, the participants were virtually in the same room.

Columbia's libraries are being transformed by technology. The University is a leader in research in digital collections, and already has several, such as the Digital Scriptorium collection of medieval and early Renaissance manuscripts; the APIS collection of papyrus papers; and digital dictionaries of South Asian languages, among others.

Technology also has infiltrated the library study spaces, with network connections at many seats, networked computer terminals scattered throughout, and dedicated, high-tech areas such as the Butler Media Center. The center, located across from the College Reserves, opened a year and a half ago and has built its collection to over 3,000 videos and DVDs. Students can check tapes out and watch them at home or in multimedia carrels that have TVs, multi-format VCRs, audio equipment and computers with editing equipment where students can edit their own films.

Columbia continues to experiment with technology and networks. Current projects include integrating the phone and computer systems so one can talk through the computer, increasing videoconferencing capabilities, and expanding wireless technology. Peter Allen, associate professor of computer science at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, periodically dispatches a robot to wander around campus using wireless communication and global positioning software. Wireless Web surfing is already available on the Low Library steps and in some common areas - to use it, laptops need a card that costs about $150 and is standard on many new models.

Wireless is also making its way into classrooms, so teachers and students can be on the same (Web) page without any wires. That could make classes more interactive. For example, Professor George Flynn in the chemistry department thinks it might be helpful for a student to be able to instant message a question anonymously to the front of the room. It would show up on the classroom computer, whose image is projected onto a larger screen.

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