These infrastructure upgrades often involve the delivery of very high bandwidth capabilities to every classroom, faculty offices and on-campus residence halls. Ethernet is the most common high speed connection used on most campuses. Such connections are convenient to use and are about 350 times faster than the traditional telephone modems available to off-campus students. When such upgrades take place on a university campus, students residing in off-campus fraternities and sororities or apartments are usually left with telephone modems for connecting to the university's data network. Access via a modem is not only slow but limited by the fact that in many cases modem access is automatically disconnected after a specific time period of use by the computing center in order to prevent some students from dominating the modem pool access to the university network.
Busy signals are also a problem in getting into the university network via modem.
The significance of speed can be illustrated by a common course project assigned by an instructor which requires the student to access multiple Web sites in search of information prior to the synthesis of this information into a report. The speed and convenience with which a student can access multiple Web sites, obtain information, and move on to others sites is a critical factor in students being able to complete assignments in a timely manner. The goal was for WSU to become a national leader in virtual education in terms of its institution-wide commitment to incorporating technology based courses into the curriculum. Student and faculty and faculty involvement was significant. By 1996 more than half of the freshmen students would be experiencing some aspect of the instructional portion of Virtual WSU and the number of faculty participants was projected to be three fourths of the total faculty by 1999.