On February 10, residents of Barton, Sharp, Davison, and Nugent halls were informed of the installation of wireless access points and related equipment in their residence halls. These access points will allow students in the common areas of the dorms, as well as student rooms close to them, to access the RPI network and the Internet wirelessly. Installations have also begun in Crockett, Bray, Hall, Nason, Warren, and Cary Halls.
The access points will provide 802.11g wireless service, which operates at 54 Mbps, to the residence halls receiving them. Students will be able to connect to the RPI network just as in the Student Union or on the academic side of campus through the use of their computer’s 802.11b/g receiver (internal to most recent laptop models) and the Cisco Systems VPN Client software. In the past, many receivers installed on campus were 802.11b (11 Mbps) because the IBM ThinkPads at the time were limited to 802.11b. However, those access points are slowly being retrofitted with 802.11g radio units.
These installations continue the trend of expansion of the RPI computer network that has been taking place both on campus and in surrounding Troy via the TroyNet project. The department responsible for network infrastructure is Networking and Telecommunications, directed by John Bradley and Associate Director Graham Doig.
Michael Battista CSYS ’08, hoped that the new access points “would provide a better group working environment in dorms by allowing team members to all connect to the internet instead of one with one port.” He continued, “they should have these access points operational as soon as they’re set up so work in this semester could be utilized as well.”
Dan VanBorkulo ELEC/CSYS ’08 commented, “With a handful of technicians and limited funds given to the RPI network, we have one of the most reliable and forward-thinking networks of any campus.”
Bradley and Doig pointed to several other network initiatives aimed at expanding and improving the RPI network. They include “developing uniform network policies, bandwidth allocation mechanisms, the purchase of dark fiber (fiber-optic cable that is not connected to any device, but merely installed), the rebuilding of the cable infrastructure [of the campus’ 32 academic buildings],” and the gradual deployment of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phones across campus.
The residence halls, though they have wiring that is only about five years old and capable of gigabit (1000 Mbps) speeds, are limited by their network equipment to about 10 Mbps per port, which in turn are connected via a one Gbps fiber-optic line to the VCC. Over the past few years, RPI has also increased the reach of its local area network to include several RPI-associated office buildings in Troy, to the Java++ Coffeehouse, and down most of College Avenue to Broadway.
Network cabling upgrades are presently being made in several areas of campus, most notably in the CII and the Lally Building. The wiring and equipment in these buildings, according to Doig, is being upgraded to accommodate not only the day-to-day operation of computers in those buildings, but to facilitate bandwidth-intensive research projects.
In addition to the network expansion taking place on campus, Bradley and Graham cited the expansion of RPI’s Internet presence via its connection to NYSERNET, a high-speed 10 Gbps network connection between 31 educational and research institutions in New York State. Additionally, the purchase of dark fiber capacity in nearby Troy and Albany will supplement RPI’s OC3 (155 Mbps) Internet and Internet2 connection with a 25% increase in bandwidth over the next five years.
One of the largest projects being worked on by Networking and Telecommunications is the installation of networking capacity in EMPAC. Bradley said this is one of the large upcoming projects for his department, whose job it is to plan the infrastructure and properly instruct the network installation consultants who ultimately perform the installation.
Along with the new wireless access points in the residence halls, improvements to the wired Ethernet equipment in the dorms and across campus, as well as wider initiatives off campus, are continuing to evolve to meet growing student expectations with regard to network bandwidth and infrastructure.
