U. Illinois plummets in Yahoo! survey for being wired

Lisa Smith
University Wire
05-04-1999
(Daily Illini) (U-WIRE) CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Last year, the University of Illinois was ranked the fifth most wired college in America by Yahoo! Internet Life magazine. This year, the University dropped to 185th in the same survey.

Lack of computer availability hurt the University in the survey which was released on April 13. Of the nine Computing and Communications Services Office sites, only the sites at Illini Hall and the Oregon lab are open 24 hours a day Monday through Thursday. Five are open until at least midnight Mondays through Thursdays.

Consequently, only 22 percent of University computers are available for general student use all day. For students that live in residence halls, only 56 percent of dorms are wired, the survey said.

The most-wired college -- Case Western Reserve University -- has 90 percent of its computers available 24 hours a day and 100 percent of its dorm rooms wired.

Beth Scheid, assistant director of CCSO communications engineering, said all 5,500 residence hall rooms are connected. The 56 percent represents the percentage of students in dorm rooms that actually have a computer connected. Of the 82 certified student houses -- which include sororities, fraternities and private dorms -- 26 use UIUCnet, the campus' computer network, Scheid said.

The connection percentage is likely to increase as computers are being used more, said Michael Gardner, associate director of CCSO communications engineering.

"There is a lot of room for growth in the dorms," he said.

The University gives free campus technical support eight hours a day, five days a week. However, the survey reported that Case Western Reserve University offers support 16 hours a day, seven days a week.

Randy Cetin, associate director of CCSO systems and operations, said lack of funding was a major reason CCSO cannot offer more support time. Cetin said there are always trade-offs to be made in the CCSO budget.

"The ideal consulting arrangement would be to have one consultant on-call 24--7 for every user," Cetin said. "Unfortunately, this is not financially possible."

Cetin said other priorities include buying improved computers and hardware and installing more dial-up lines.

Dave Ruby, manager of CCSO instructional computing sites, said the campus definitely needs more full-time network support experts. For example, he said that at the Resource Center, located in the Digital Computing Lab, there are three site consultants on duty from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and they are always busy.

"Getting good talent to want to stay here for the money we can afford to pay them is hard," Ruby said.

Ruby said students using the CCSO sites can always ask the consultant on duty any question, but the University lacks a central 24-hour resource center for students to turn to for all computing questions.

In the survey, Massachusetts Institute of Technology was ranked second, moving up one spot from last year. Big Ten schools such as Indiana University and Northwestern each fell one spot, to nine and 18 respectively.

Besides the University, there were other surprising drops. Dartmouth College, last year's most wired college, dropped 25 spots. Washington State University, which was ranked number 44 last year, jumped to number 7 in this year's survey. UCLA jumped 12 spots to number 11 this year.

The lower rankings of some universities could reflect the survey itself. For example, a 30 percent increase in the survey poll made the ranking more competitive for all schools. The University's drop does not necessarily indicate that it has become any less wired, but that perhaps other colleges have become more wired.

There was also new criteria considered in this year's survey. This included the number of laptop ports installed on campus, the accessibility of equipment such as digital cameras, the number of computers available per student, computer lab hours and the availability of wireless services.

This survey's focus on wireless service could be what brought the University down so significantly.

Scheid said the University is well wired with its hardware system.

"We have such a well wired campus as it is," Scheid said. "It is more efficient and cheaper than wireless."

Cetin said it would not be practical for the University to install wireless connections on a large scale.

There are 11 computer terminals for every 100 students at the University. But at Case Western Reserve University, there are more than 40 terminals for every 100 students.

The University guarantees seven megabytes of Web space to students whereas the top school guarantees 25 megabytes. Seven megabytes is close to the space of five floppy disks.

Because the University is so large, it is harder to institute computer terminals, megabytes of Web space and network support on a scale that would make the University comparable to the much smaller Case Western Reserve University, which has a total enrollment of about 8,900 undergraduate and graduate students.

"It's definitely easier to support 10,000 people total than 40,000," Ruby said.

Regardless of the survey, Ruby was confident in the University's network compared to the networks of other universities.

"Not many others have better networks," he said.



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