They're hooked on campus broadband, college students say
| • | Broadband Internet growing at snail's pace |
By A.S. Berman
USA Today
Early afternoon and the food court at George Mason University's campus in Fairfax, Va., is a blur of denim and backpacks as students flit from group to group.
USA Today
In a world where demanding classes, hectic social lives and part-time jobs are all juggled with one eye on the clock, it's little wonder that some of the most vocal fans of high-speed Internet access are college students.
Dennis Tschai, a student at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., uses the school's broadband Internet connection to download music from sites such as KaZaA and MusicCity.
In the time it takes some dial-up users to log on, those with broadband can look something up at the library, send an instant message or download a song.
"It's free and fast," said GMU junior Dennis Tschai, 20, a communications major from Virginia Beach. "This report I'm doing for my English class, I have not stepped into the campus library yet. I've researched and gathered all my information via the Web."
Of the 15.3 million college students nationwide, about 12.9 million have high-speed access on campus, said Amy Cravens of research firm Cahners In-Stat Group. Besides high-speed connections in libraries, student union buildings and computer labs, nearly 67 percent of schools with broadband extend the pipeline into dorms, she added.
Most, like GMU, include technology costs in tuition and fees, which average $164 to $282 a year, said Kenneth Green, director of the Encino, Calif.-based Campus Computing Project, which studies the effects of technology on higher education.
Research and recreation
When senior Cameron Frasier, 21, of Hampton, Va., enrolled at GMU, he hadn't had much experience with the Internet. But after four years of teachers who expect in-depth research and others who use e-mail to communicate after-hours with students, the electrical engineering major has learned to appreciate broadband.
As graduation looms, Frasier has discovered that many companies prefer online job applications because they "feed into their system better," he said.
Faculty also find broadband useful, especially when it comes to disseminating information to large numbers of students, said Michael Kelley, GMU professor of English and telecommunications.
When he finds an article that might be of interest to students, he uses a class e-mail list to send it out at the push of a button. Broadband lets students view large documents faster too, he said.
Though education is the primary reason students have been given high-speed access, the recreational uses are not lost on them.
So many students were downloading free music that by August 2000, 34 percent of U.S. colleges and universities had banned access to the song-trading service Napster, according to a survey of 50 public and private institutions by Gartner research group.
It was inevitable, said Michael Pastore, managing editor of CyberAtlas, a Web site covering Internet market research. Kids have "gotten access to all this bandwidth in college that they probably didn't have at home, and kids love music," he said.
Napster, credited with starting the music download craze after its 1999 debut, went off-line in July in preparation for relaunch as a paid service. But before it went off-line, said research firm Webnoize, more than 85 percent of students downloaded music from the Net.
