Rice ranks 14th among nation's most wired universities

By Frank Alfaro     9/11/08 7:00pm

Rice's annual appearance on The Princeton Review's listing of America's top colleges may be old news, but Rice can now add a spot on PC Magazine's list of the Top Twenty Wired Colleges to its accomplishments. For the first time, Rice placed 14 on the list in terms of academics, student resources, infrastructure and technological support in this month's issue of the magazine.Rice beat out PC Magazine's Most Wired College of 2006, Villanova University, which placed 15 this year. The top ranked schools include University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Kansas State University and the University of Utah.

These results are based on a survey sent out to the schools on The Princeton Review's The Best 368 Colleges. Each school was given points based on its responses to the survey and ranked according to those scores.

In 2007, Rice was one of 13 universities Campus Technology magazine named as a Campus Technology Innovator. Vice Provost for Information Technology Kamran Khan said both awards recognize Rice's recent IT developments.

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"We've spent the last three years upgrading our campus network and replacing it after talking with faculty and students and staff," Khan said.

Khan said Rice's nearly campus-wide wireless internet access - there are still some spots without access in a few of the parking lots and parts of the stadium - was the primary aspect of the improved infrastructure that garnered the high ranking. Additional wireless access points were set up around the campus over the last four years to improve the infrastructure and make the former Ethernet connection system faster. New buildings on campus will also have more wireless access points to make the network even more accessible.

Khan said the PC Magazine ranking was good recognition for Rice, though IT wishes to focus instead on its future technological endeavors.

"I think it's always good to be on a list, but for us it's more what's happening on the ground," Khan said. "I think knowing that people are benefiting from the new network means more than being on a list."

William Deigaard (Wiess '92), director of networking, telecommunications and data center operations, said he agrees that making the list was never a strategic objective for the university. Instead, he wants to focus on extending the campus' wireless capabilities. The large number of students that benefit from the network is supported by the high on-campus residency, Deigaard said.

"We wanted the network to be ubiquitous, so it was always there," Deigaard said. "The key thing was that if it was widely available and easy to use, then people would use it for all sorts of things."

Will Rice College sophomore Rachael Petersen said it was crucial that a campus have readily available, fast wireless internet access.

"Schools that aren't as wired are behind the times," Petersen said. "Students work everywhere. They work in their dorms, they work in coffee shops, so it's nice to know wherever you go on campus you can work online."

Deigaard said there are still technological barriers Rice has to cross, including finding power sources for laptops. Khan said technological advances leave room for later add-ons.

"We wanted flexibility - to be able to add on, for example, surveillance cameras, PDAs, laptops, VoIP and other new services," Khan said.

Mobility was also one of the key factors for upgrading the network, Deigaard said. He said reliability and availability were also factors because the old network had issues due to outdated components.

Will Rice senior Jonathan Palazzolo said he has noticed a change in campus technology during his time at Rice.

"It's definitely a big improvement over [my] freshman year because Will Rice wasn't wireless, so you had to plug in to everything," Palazzolo said.

Deigaard said the campus has gone through several phases of technological change since he has graduated.

"[Then] students were not allowed to have a modem because it constituted an unfair advantage for some students," Deigaard said.

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