Dartmouth takes pride in its wireless Ethernet network. It's fast, it works all around campus and it gives students instant access to the World Wide Web, campus servers and, of course, BlitzMail. Unfortunately, these privileges only extend to students on campus. In the past, students living off campus have been forced to use an agonizingly slow dial-up service for all their Internet needs.
Two recent graduates hope to change that. Greenwave, a cooperative venture between the College and its founders, Zach Berke '02 and Chris Lentz '02, now allows students living off campus to access the College's wireless Ethernet service for $50 a term, less costly than an extra phone line or America Online service.
"Dial-up service is a pain in the butt. It kicks you off a lot, you can't use GreenPrint ... and in a house with six girls, it gets pretty busy when only one person can be online at a time," Megan Bussey '04 said.
Bussey said that when she and her housemates heard of Greenwave, "we were like 'Come tomorrow.'"
Like radio waves or a cell-phone signal, wireless Ethernet is a signal broadcast from a series of access points around campus. Users who receive this signal get access just like someone who is plugged in to the network.
Unfortunately, the range of wireless is severely limited. Off campus, many houses receive only weak, "flaky" signals. Even more receive no signal at all.
"Right now, if I go outside and stand up on my roof, I might get a trickle of a signal, but that's it," Lentz said from his off-campus house. "I couldn't do something like computer science or engineering homework like that."
Initially, Dartmouth attempted to coax a cable or DSL service provider into the Hanover area to address the bandwidth needs of off-campus students. But according to Brad Noblet, director of technical services in the College's Computing Services department, arriving at a feasible business model was difficult.
Due to the expense of adding high-speed Internet infrastructure and the time it takes for that kind of investment to pay off, "in non-metropolitan areas, these services will have to be subsidized in some fashion." Noblet said.
Last year, Berke, annoyed with slow dial-up service, used a homemade antenna to amplify the weak wireless signal around his house. His wireless capability was then equal to what he could get on campus.
"It was pretty cool," Berke said. "It was fast, and it was working really well. The people next door were even getting a signal. I thought that maybe we could start connecting people and even make a small business out of this."
Berke and Lentz had worked together the previous year on a project called Tacos Wireless Identification, an online theft"prevention service that allows users to register wireless devices and then monitor their location on"campus. It won the College's Kemeny Computer Prize and its authors even received coverage by Wired Magazine. When they took their project to the College, Computing services was highly receptive.
"I've been on a mission the last nine months or so to get high-speed access to the Upper Valley," Johnson said. "We wanted to make sure all Dartmouth students, faculty and staff have high-speed access to the Internet. [Berke and Lentz] had this idea, and I had a need. We can collectively offer high"speed access at a price people are willing to pay."
In exchange for use of the College's Internet privileges, Berke and Lentz agreed to provide the manpower and marketing force -- they designed and built the infrastructure necessary to establish the off-campus network.
For the most part, this consists of assembling and installing the antennas that make strong wireless signals available off-campus. It also includes doing all the security and technical support related to their network. Future plans include the codevelopment of better and cheaper antennas with the Thayer school, and possibly even extending the coverage to the whole Upper Valley.
"Hanover could be the first completely wireless town, ever," Lentz said.
