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When Brad Noblet arrived at Dartmouth in October, people asked the newly
hired director of Technical Services two questions:
"When are we going to get high-speed Internet in the Upper Valley, and
are you ever going to fix dial-up?" Noblet said. "I guess I've got my
work cut out!"
But progress is coming, albeit slowly, on both projects, as well as on other
means of securely accessing the network from remote locations.
While metro areas have seen cable companies and telephone carriers race to
wire neighborhoods for broadband, there hasn't been any big rush to do the same
in the Upper Valley.
For companies like Verizon and Adelphia, wiring rural areas for digital
services doesn't appear to make much sense. Household densities per square mile
are light by comparison with the suburbs, where single towns often have more
residents than this area.
But Noblet and Director of Computing Larry Levine have been pitching an
alternative point of view to area carriers. And it looks like they are starting
to listen.
Verizon has "jumped," Noblet said, and is now working on a
business case that will help clarify the value of investing in the
infrastructure needed to service parts of the Hanover-Lebanon area with digital
subscriber line (DSL) technology, allowing households to run both voice and
high-speed data simultaneously over a single line.
In recent years, Adelphia has been laying the new cable required for two-way
data services, but the rollout of those services is still another 18 months
away, Noblet said. And there might yet be other carriers with technologies for
wireless technology that sound very promising. But, aside from some encouraging
conversations, there doesn't seem to be any new commitment to broadband from
the regional carriers, Noblet said.
So the focus of discussions with the companies is on ways to speed up the
process, to identify a critical mass of customers. A certain number of College
faculty, staff, and off-campus students, for example, would be likely to sign
up for reliable broadband service, if offered at a reasonable price. The
discussion might also be joined by other Hanover officials as the town and
Adelphia begin to renegotiate their contract, Noblet said.
The potential benefits to the companies and area residents are plain to see,
Noblet said: flexible work schedules, some alleviation of parking, traffic, and
building congestion. Bottom line: high-speed Internet access is coming to the
Upper Valley at some point, but not soon enough for Noblet, who is trying to
speed things up.
Also on the horizon is the advent of virtual private network (VPN) services.
A VPN connection would allow someone to dial into a local access number
anywhere and connect securely to the Dartmouth network, as if they were
physically on the campus.
The need for VPN capability is growing, Noblet said, and would be important
if a company like Adelphia or Verizon began offering broadband services.
Currently, the only way to get similar connectivity to Dartmouth's network is
to dial directly into the College modem pool.
VPN services would be enabled by the acquisition of new equipment related to
a proposed network upgrade project.
The good news: Broadband access to the Internet is coming to the Upper
Valley soon. The bad news: Until something changes, Dartmouth faculty, staff,
and off-campus students are going to have to rely on an unreliable dial-up
service — a service that's been maddeningly difficult to troubleshoot and
improve — or pay for an account with another, more reliable, ISP.
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