Your 50$ per term educational technology resource fee provides you with network access through your Gladstone computer account. This access can either come through any networked computer on campus or via modem from your home computer. Before getting all excited about the prospects of unlimited connectivity and net surfing, it is important that you are fully informed about what the practical limitations on these two types of access issues and that, for most all purposes, ON campus Access is far more practical than OFF campus access.

ON Campus Access Issues and Resources:

• Between the various student computer labs and the facilities in the knight and science libraries there are approximately 300 networked machines.

• These machines are connected to the campus backbone which currently has a bandwidth of 1.25 Megabyes per second. Hence, if professor X is storing some data file that you need for his class on some campus machine and its 1 megabyte in length, you will be able to copy that file to the machine you are on in about 1 second.

• Any Networked platform on campus will provide you also with Internet Access. Our current level of internet connectivity is about 3 times slower than the campus network. In addition, at any one time, an individual user surfing the net with Netscape or whatever, has about 10\% of the bandwidth they can utilize for file transfer. This means that if you want to fetch an image or some file that is say 1 megabyte in size from some site on the internet, the transfer time will be about 30 times slower or about 30 seconds.

OFF Campus Access Issues and Resources:

• The total size of the current UO modem pool is about 330. There are 20,000 potential users of this modem pool. If we wanted capacity such that each of the 20,000 users could have an hour of access time per 24 hour period we would need 833 modems. Present plans call for an expansion of the modem pool to a total of about 400. We will never have enough modem capacity to satisfy the user community. Hence, busy signals are a fact of life when it comes to the modem pool.

• For most curriculum related activities, resource retrieval using a modem is extremely inefficient. Even with the highest speed modem connection currently available (28.8K), the level of connectivity to the internet is 10 times slower than being at an ON campus networked platform. Now it takes 300 seconds (5 minutes) to transfer your one megabyte file. It is simply an inefficient use of your life to plan on accessing internet curriculum materials (and of course, those pesky non curriculum materials) via your modem line. For text based applications (e.g. email) the UO modem services will provide adequate throughput.

• Third party vendors: There are now some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the Eugene area. These include the Eugene Free Net and The Pond They represent a reasonable alternative to the UO busy signal if you are a heavy modem user. In addition, ISDN and Fram Relay services, offered by the Phone Company will make a larger penetration into the Eugene Area and that is realtively high bandwidth (56--128K) access. Hence, remote access to the UO network can be gained with the increasing prevalance of third party ISPs.

Access Economics

We are trying to use your educational technology fee to provide you with reasonable access to network resources. Each new modem which is bought costs about $1,000 and 350 dollars per year for phone line charges. A reasonable on campus, high bandwidth, networked platform costs around $2500. Thus, modems are not cheap but represent an appreciable cost of buying an entire cpu and placing it in a student lab. Since networked based curriculum and instructional technology is the validating reason for student access to the Internet, this can only be optimized by increasing the number of ON campus platforms.

Over the coming year we hope to refine our management of modems to accomodate a wide range of student needs. However, we emphasize that for all practical purposes, and certainly for all curriculum related issues, ON campus access of the network is the most sensible, painless and efficient way for students to manage their time. Complaining about saturated modem lines is not constructive nor will it solve anything. The analog is clear: if you need to find a book in the library then you have to come to campus to do that - if you need to have reliable and high speed access to the Internet, then you need to come to campus. Staring at your modem and wishing it would tranmit data faster has been proven not to work.