High-tech dorms move to head of the class at colleges

Spanking-new student dormitories at Case Western Reserve University and Duke University show how living on campus increasingly means being networked and digitized.

The residence halls incorporate sophisticated wired and wireless data networks, environmental and building management systems backhauled over the campus IP network, and a wide range of services such as streaming video including cable TV over IP, networked clothes washers and improved cellular voice coverage. While full VoIP services are still rare on campus, dorm infrastructures are being planned with VoIP in mind.

Spending on new or retrofitted dorms varies widely depending on school size and on the private or public funds that can be raised to pay for them. But most schools plan to use networks to deliver more technology-based services to student residences; to improve security; and to monitor and control lighting, heating and cooling.

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Spanking-new student dormitories at Case Western Reserve University and Duke University show how living on campus increasingly means being networked and digitized.

The residence halls incorporate sophisticated wired and wireless data networks, environmental and building management systems backhauled over the campus IP network, and a wide range of services such as streaming video including cable TV over IP, networked clothes washers and improved cellular voice coverage. While full VoIP services are still rare on campus, dorm infrastructures are being planned with VoIP in mind.

Spending on new or retrofitted dorms varies widely depending on school size and on the private or public funds that can be raised to pay for them. But most schools plan to use networks to deliver more technology-based services to student residences; to improve security; and to monitor and control lighting, heating and cooling.

"Students spend 15 to 18 hours a week, at most, in classrooms," says David Futey, associate director of academic computing at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif., and chairman of the ResNet Symposium, a group of higher-education administrators and others who focus on IT for students in residences. "So [residence networks] are evolving at some institutions: as the [network] infrastructure matures, the goal is providing a more-consistent suite of services for students no matter where they are."

The Association of College and University Housing Officers International (ACUHO-I) in Columbus, Ohio, is tackling some of these issues as part of its 21st Century Project, which is charged with creating specifications for a prototype state-of-the-art residence hall. ACUHO-I consists of 5,800 individuals from more than 900 colleges and universities and more than 205 companies.The first summit meeting for the project is scheduled for early 2006.

Case Western Reserve, in Cleveland, shows what money and a comprehensive view of network technologies can create. The residential part of the new $126-million "Village at 115" hosts more than 700 students in seven separate "houses" to keep the number of students in each fairly small. The rooms in each house vary in size, for one to nine students.

The Village's distribution hub interconnects the school's Cisco-based 10G bit/sec fiber backbone to Cisco Catalyst 6500 switches and the premises' Cat6E cabling. A wall plate in every dorm room has one VoIP port and two data ports.

All areas in the residences are blanketed with an 802.11g wireless LAN (WLAN) based on 140 Cisco Aironet 1231g access points. Even the football and track fields are covered wirelessly by four Vivato VP2210 Wi-Fi base stations. To support the access points, Case Western uses Cisco's 6148 X2 line card. "It splits each gigabit port into two 100-megabit ports," says Steven Organiscak, special projects manager with the university's IT Services. "For applications where you don't need a full gigabit, and for [IP] phones, 100-meg is fine. It essentially doubles the density in that one blade slot."