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reply to swintec

Re: Cable modem at college?

I used to be involved with supporting cable tv in dorms at a university. Each of the buildings was wired a little bit differently.

In the high rise dorms there was a riser cable with a tap on every floor, and then the rooms were daisy chained off the tap. They used taps rather than splitters behind the wall plate in each room. The last person in the chain would have the weakest signal, but it wasn't bad.

Some of the newer dorms (built in 99 and 03) had home run connections to each room. In one building built in 03 the contractor screwed up (and nobody thought to check this until the construction had been signed off on) there was a home run to each suite, but then there was a splitter in the suite for the 4-5 rooms.

Then the last choice was up and down risers in 4 story dorms that would serve rooms on each side of the wall. So you'd get 4 floors back to back with for a total of 8 rooms with one rise with a bunch of taps along the way (does that explanation make sense?). That building was the most difficult to troubleshoot because rooms next to each other wouldn't always have the same cable, and it was difficult to know where it was.

The actual cable service was provided via satellite by a company that exists just to provide cable tv access to universities and hospitals.

There are two other universities I am aware of that own their own cable plant (no idea of the wiring setup though) and contract to someone to provide cable TV at the head end.

All 3 of these were large state schools. I have a feeling having the local cable company provide service is probably more likely in smaller private schools.

Cable modems would not have worked in any of the 3 cable systems I was aware of. Two of them were satellite provided and the third purchased service from a local cable company, but had it customized to provide university channels, etc.

Also, in the case of all 3 of these campuses, using any kind of network connectivity not provided by the university was not allowed. Using any system to bridge connections between two networks was also definitely not allowed.

When those sorts of policies were written, the intent was not to limit dorm students (probably no one was even thinking about them), but to prevent professors from bringing in their own pipes into buildings, or from having professors or staff set up their own dialup gateways, etc.

All wiring is owned by the university, and must be installed by the university. It makes sense that if someone needs a larger pipe for research rather than bringing in their own net access, not securing it properly and bridging it to the university network for file access, and then letting hackers in, they can instead spend the money to do that correctly and bring in access through the university computing center. If you need 10 gig to a building and want to pay for it, they can make it happen.