Many campus administrators think they can afford to wait a few years for the various remote-access technologies to sort themselves out. H. David Lambert, the vice president for university information services and chief information officer at Georgetown University, says he expects that remote access at a reasonable price and with privacy protections for even the most sensitive research and medical applications will eventually be available everywhere. In the meantime, more colleges have repackaged their modem pools and now offer a mix of free and fee-based services, a strategy that seems to be working. The size of Berkeley's modem pool stabilized at 800 modems more than four years ago, after computing officials partitioned the pool to create classes of service. A second free-service pool lets students stay connected for up to two hours before their connection times out, but it is more likely to have busy signals than the Warhol pool.
Faculty members have free use of the guaranteed-access pool.
But he says any type of modem access will still be inferior to the network access that the university offers to students who live in the dormitories. At Berkeley, the standard for new desktop connections on campus is Ethernet at 100 megabits per second. That's 50 to 200 times more network capacity, or bandwidth, than students can get from basic D.S.L. service, and 1,800 times more bandwidth than they could get from a standard modem under optimum conditions. Nearly 3,000 students at Berkeley are enrolled in courses that rely on some kind of streaming media. Those portions of the courses are unusable if the students' computers and their network connections are not fast enough to handle them.