Breaking the Cables that Bind Us

While Harvard seems to hold its own perfectly well in the majority of college ranking sources (it was big news, you’ll recall, when an Atlantic Monthly article placed us 5th earlier this year), one such list published in early April held that our fine institution came in at a paltry 69th place. That list, Intel’s survey of “The Most Unwired College Campuses,” was meant to assess the degree to which wireless networking technology has taken hold at educational institutions across the country. To be fair, 69th is nothing to scoff at—neither Yale nor Princeton were in the top 100—but Dartmouth was 5th, MIT was 26th, and apparently football isn’t the only game at which we lose to Penn, as they beat us by a full 3 spots, coming in at 66th.

Wireless access at the college has expanded enormously, even during my short two-year tenure—access points (devices that act as a liaison of sorts between the wired network and the airwaves) can be found in the common spaces of all the houses and most big lecture halls, and the common rooms in the Yard are set to be hooked up by next fall. So where do we come up short? Apart from access in outdoor courtyards (which is reasonably impractical given that the Bostonian winter seems to start in October and end two weeks before classes do), the only real shortcoming of our wireless network is that we don’t have reliable connectivity in our dorm rooms.

To anyone who has never had such access in a place of residence, this might seem like a frivolous demand—how bad is it to have to plug into an Ethernet jack that even in the most generous of housing arrangements is no more than 20 feet away? But ask any biochem concentrator who sleeps in the science center and they’ll tell you that there’s a unique liberty in being able to surf the web from a couch or research a paper in bed, and I also tend to believe it increases productivity.

Harvard is a complicated institution, however, and it appears the economy hasn’t been so strong lately. So I’m willing to suspend disbelief long enough to accept that even with 20 billion dollars in the bank we don’t have the dough to throw into “un-wiring” up all of Lowell’s entryways. Still, there’s a better way. College policy currently dictates that students are not allowed to install their own access points in their rooms, citing three rough concerns as justification. This policy is unreasonable, as the concerns are all easy to resolve.

First among the issues raised by computer services is that an improperly configured access point could potentially disrupt network connectivity to nearby dorm residents. This is true; however, such spuriously operating devices are easy to track down, and in fact even under the current no-access point policy are occasionally taken off the network. Furthermore, Harvard policy already permits the installation of wired routers, which carry exactly the same risks if poorly configured. The remaining two possibilities, that student-run wireless equipment might interfere with the College’s own such gear, and that improperly configured access-points might give non-Harvard affiliates (who happened to be walking down a nearby street with an open laptop) free access to our network, can both be avoided by establishing a relatively straightforward set of conditions that all wireless devices must meet before they can be installed.

What’s more, we wouldn’t even have to think too hard to develop such a set of guidelines. MIT has already developed a clear policy statement on what sorts of wireless devices may be connected to their network and under what conditions, and lest you think that this only works for them because they’re such a tech-savvy community, Penn and Princeton have similar guidelines, and even Yale has an ambiguous but not clearly prohibitive policy. And each is tailored to solve specific problems those universities see arising in the future: Princeton, for example, reserves the right to restrict student installations in any area once their own wireless devices are eventually installed there.

Even if Harvard took a particularly low road and restricted the use of access points to one of a few expensive devices (indeed, even if only to devices available from Harvard’s own salespeople) that could not be configured improperly, people would buy these—the same people that spend hundreds of dollars to rent micro-fridges from Harvard Student Agencies (HSA) every Fall. And the beautiful thing about wireless networking is it’s free to share: If one suite on each hall got an access point, or one or two rooms in each entryway, it is almost certainly the case that the entire College would have adequate wireless signal. To some extent there’s a free rider problem, but I suspect Harvard students are generous enough (and want wireless access badly enough) that a sufficient few will bite the bullet and spend a hundred bucks for the benefit of their friends and hall mates.

Dartmouth doesn’t allow private wireless access points on campus. It doesn’t need to—it has 100 percent coverage. Every square foot of Dartmouth soil is within reach of that college’s wireless network. Harvard is bigger than Dartmouth, and we have more professional schools to which we kowtow and more red tape to wade through. Still, a policy through which students provide their own access is more or less free (perhaps modulo the cost of hiring an additional couple user assistants to offset the time spent dealing with whatever small number of problems arise when people set up their equipment in the Fall) and carries with it the possibility to markedly improve the quality of student life in residence. I’m not asking the administration to improve Harvard for us—they’re trying plenty hard to do that on their own, and they have their hands full. I’m just asking for permission to try and do so myself.

Matthew A. Gline ’06 is a physics concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.