Wireless Ethernet Advances Haltingly

Pictures of little gray boxes with bunny ear attennaes protruding have tantalized residents of Adams House for five months now, their promise of untethered instant messaging unfulfilled.

The signs—marking locations of planned transmitters—represent progress on a much-awaited project to provide wireless ethernet access in all of the Houses’ common areas.

On the one hand, this progress has been substantial.

Three years ago, plans for wireless were only a glimmer in the techies’ eyes. Now two Houses, the Science Center, the Maxwell-Dworkin building, Loker Commons and Cabot, Hilles, Lamont and Widener Libraries all have wireless Internet access.

With paperwork and planning for Adams, Dunster, Eliot, Mather and Quincy Houses complete, those Houses await only the physical installation and wiring for access points.

And Cabot was wired in a “spurt” of progress that began this week.

On the other hand, in the five Houses, the signs are still the full extent of that progress.

Last spring, Director of Harvard Arts and Sciences Computer Services (HASCS) Frank M. Steen hopefully predicted that installations in the all of the Houses would be completed by the end of the calendar year, but that date passed with the full installation of only Kirkland and Leverett.

Engineers have mapped out optimal locations for the wireless hubs—hence the signs. Equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars has been purchased. Yet until this week the process had been stalled—by as much as five months in Adams and Eliot—as the Houses awaited final installation.

Nuts, Bolts and Wireless Hubs

Davis and Steen say that forward momentum has been regained and that teams will wire Adams, Eliot and Dunster next week.

But a number of unforseen difficulties—including staffing issues, competing HASCS projects and construction problems—have delayed the process by several months.

“It has taken much longer to do dorms then ever expected,” Steen says.

The installation in the Houses is every bit a priority as it ever was and HASCS’ tight budget is not a factor, Steen says.

Library reading rooms remain the top priority for wireless installation, but the Houses are a close second, he says.

And the whole project was accounted for in last year’s operating budget.

“The wiring has already cost more than we expected, but we believe the funding is there to finish the project as planned with all the House common areas and library reading rooms—we’re funded fine for that,” Steen says.

Steen says that he now hopes that the five Houses will be done within “the next few months, probably sooner than that.”

The major constraint is the availability of Network Operations staff, Steen says.

The overall installation process has several steps:

Masters are polled to determine where access is needed, engineers examine the sites to map out optimal transmitter locations and a final plan for installation is eventually signed off on.

Network Operations staff members must then oversee outside contractors as they install the wires linking access points to the network.

This step is the one at which the five Houses are currently caught.

“We can’t just send a team of contractors, we have to send staffers with them: that’s as much a limiting factor as anything,” Steen says. “It’s simply a time issue for what our network staff has had to do.”

That same staff is responsible for overseeing work at construction projects across FAS, and must conform to a schedule determined by these large projects’ pace.

“We have an economical network operation, we can’t do everything at once,” Steen says. “This project is supposed to be done in line with normal work—there’s not funding to hire a lot of people to do it.”

At the same time, these operations teams and the contractors they are supervising are encountering unexpected construction difficulties.

“Installers have run into a number of problems since starting the work,” Steen says. “Every installation involves some new surprises.”

As for the Houses that aren’t yet at the wiring stage, Steen and Coordinator of Residential Computing Kevin S. Davis say the process is moving forward.

Engineers are in the process of surveying Currier and masters in Dudley and Lowell Houses are now reviewing plans detailing the exact future locations of access points, Davis says.

Winthrop House had its initial meeting to discuss wireless last week, but Pforzheimer has not yet begun the planning process, Davis says.

“We’ve been working with each House as it has been a priority to them,” Davis says.

The Extent of the Plan

Wireless ethernet will be confined to common areas of the Houses, at least for the near future, and will not cover individual dorm rooms, Davis says.

“In terms of funding, our mandate is to cover common areas; spaces where students congregate,” he says. “If you’re on your computer in your dorm room, you have a data jack.”

First-years may also have a long wait before they have access to wireless ethernet in their dorm common areas, mainly because of restrictions on altering the buildings in Harvard Yard.

“We tried to do the Yard, but ran into some [Cambridge] Historical Commission problems, but we will work on that over time,” Steen says.

Since only about 10 percent of students ever bring their computers to class, HASCS is also not focusing on extending wireless to classrooms, Steen says.

“Instructors have also expressed concern over the distraction,” he says.

Beyond the Yard

Although they may not have wireless ethernet in all classrooms, soon students from across the University will be able to access a wireless network on any of Harvard’s campuses.

This larger effort was coordinated last year when the University administration’s information technology branch organized a meeting and offered preliminary funding to jump-start wireless projects at the various schools.

Representatives from each school agreed to create a cohesive system where users can access the wireless network at any school with their own username and password.

“We had a real interest in getting in front of this so common authentication can happen,” Assistant Provost Daniel D. Moriarty, chief information officer for the University, says.

“We met and decided that that wireless should be seamless; everyone should be able to authenticate in the same way,” Steen says. “Our wireless is available to everyone at Harvard with an ID and PIN.”

The project within FAS is significantly larger than those at the other schools, though, and works in a slightly different manner, Steen says.

“FAS wireless is far, far more extensive then the rest of campus combined, maybe ten times more,” Steen says. “We think the way they did it is very limited.”

—Staff writer Katharine A. Kaplan can be reached at kkaplan@fas.harvard.edu.