How fast should campus networks be?

[rw120555]

When I plug my laptop into my $40 switch at home, I connect at 100 MB. When I plug it in to our campus network in the building I work in, it connects at 10MB. I think this building was probably wired less than 5 years ago. I'm not sure if it is this slow everywhere, but I'm wondering, is this fairly typical behavior? There are a lot of things I don't like about our campus network -- is it legit to add this to the list? It is ok for internet, but there are a lot of other purposes for which it seems awfully slow.

 

[spidey07]

So your NIC is set to autodetect speed/duplex and you're getting 10/half or 10/full?

your university could have set this up on purpose to limit the amount of file sharing/swapping or the gear could only support 10 Base-T. On the college networks I've built I ALWAYS recommend 10 base-t for the dorm connections to combat rampant abuse.

 

[rw120555]

Not sure if it is half or full, but it is 10. And, I assume it is autodetect, since it is different between home and office.

Good point about abuse, although my building is all staff and faculty. We were one of the places that blocked Napster in its prime, but I heard it took students the better part of a day to figure out a workaround. Which reminds me of the faculty member who couldn't figure out why his computer had suddenly slowed down dramatically -- turns out his son had configured it as a Napster server

 

[Buddha Bart]

"How fast should campus networks be?"

it's never enough.

10mbit is definatly getting to the end of its lifecycle as usable for a college LAN. Unless mabey its fully switched and you can get a reliable 8mbit between any two nodes on campus... but 10mbit and hub's usualy go hand in hand.

bart

 

[kgraeme]

I can tell you that at the University I work at that 10Mb is the norm. It's mostly a cost/infrastructure issue. 100Mbps switches have cost significantly more than an equivalent 10Mbps switch. Things are changing, but even three years ago the price difference was in the thousands of dollars. Remember, these are high density switches. As an example, a Cisco 80-port 10/100 switch costs $7,200+. Buildings often have several switches.

Doing some rough calculations, lets figure the cost for upgrading a 10Mbps campus. That means switches and potentially much of the cabling, which is another story altogether. So a small campus has maybe 10 academic buildings, 2 administrative, and 5 dorms. Figure 4 switches per building. That's almost half a million dollars in switches alone.

Believe me, I want 100Mbps as much or more than you do. We have a video production unit that can't even transfer files over the network because it's just not practical. But I'm willing to work around it to keep tuition reasonable.

 

[rw120555]

Thanks for the info -- I had no idea costs would be in that range. I imagine sooner or later we'll speed things up, but by then it will probably be cheaper too. The system is better than it used to be. It used to be they had this NT setup where all software was installed somewhere off in the distance -- so you'd be running Word, and it could literally take several seconds for a single character to appear on your screen after typing it. Now we have XP and software is locally installed on machines. Some things can still be painfully slow, but it is better than it was.

 

[Mallow]

Just about all Universities in Texas are 10mbit

 

[Garion]

Come on, now folks.. Complaining about a university that ONLY has 10Mb/s to each dorm room is a bit meaningless. I'd bet that 90% of the traffic goes to the Internet. A good-sized campus might have an OC3 to the Internet - 155Mb/s. If you've got 10,000 dorm rooms sharing that connection, you each get an average of 1.5Kb/s, if everyone was on at once.

In reality, 10Mb/s is really enough network bandwidth for almost anyone, even in major corporations. There are exeptions, of course - Graphics designers, engineers, hard-core developers, etc. can use more, but your average business user could easily use an 128K connection and wouldn't know the difference, except in rare circumstances when they are getting big files from an attachment or loading a big file/app from a server.

So, believe me, you won't notice the difference between 10Mb/s and 100Mb/s on a campus network. Might take a couple extra seconds to transfer a file between your two computers, but not much else will be very different.

- G

 

[kgraeme]

Quite true. On many occasions my cable connection at home was faster than my work connection on campus. There was a period of time when Napster accounted for over 90% of network traffic. Now it's other P2P hogging the pipe.

(And the days of 3Mbps transfers went away with @Home's demise.)

Edit:

So, believe me, you won't notice the difference between 10Mb/s and 100Mb/s on a campus network. Might take a couple extra seconds to transfer a file between your two computers, but not much else will be very different.

This depends significantly on the topology of the network. If proper routers and switches are in place, then workgroups in a building can certainly benefit from 100Mbps speeds. That's obviously for local transfers, not for Internet traffic.

 

[rw120555]

This depends significantly on the topology of the network. If proper routers and switches are in place, then workgroups in a building can certainly benefit from 100Mbps speeds. That's obviously for local transfers, not for Internet traffic.

I think this is a good point. A lot of research goes on in the building I am in, sometimes involving massive data sets, e.g. the Census. I suspect most people just make copies of whatever data they are using and place it on local machines. The workgroups are small enough and the staffing is low enough that it probably isn't feasible to lobby for a faster system, but I can see where it would be nice. Someday I might just fool around with hooking up a switch to a couple of machines in the same room to facilitate high-speed sharing. But, I can understand why it might be difficult to set up such high-speed access on a campus-wide basis. Thanks again for the input; I'm glad to hear we aren't too far behind the rest of the world.

 

[SKORPI0]

Tested my nieces speed in her college dorm, is this fast enough?

 

[crazydave]

I'm gonna have to disagree with the claim that you won't see a difference between 10 and 100Mbps on a college network--when I wokred at school, we jumped the gun a bit and paid a little extra to get our ports upgraded from 10 to 100 before the rest of the campus did, and man it made a LOT of difference. Maybe I'm one of the few users who actually needed the bandwidth--but everything we did from simple web surfing to large file transfers went SO much faster once we upgraded. At least for us we saw a big difference...

 

[Woodchuck2000]

The university I'm going to (Warwick (England)) has 100Mbit lan to all the rooms. That said, if it's just for internet access, 10Mbit is entirely adequate.

 

[CaptianScooby]

My sister goes to Grove City College and all of thier dorms are wired to cap out at 10Mbs too. I asked the Admin about this and he said its for most of the same reasons conveyed here.