Administrators and members of the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate are researching possible ways to expand the wireless Internet service on the Medford/Somerville campus.
Leah McIntosh, the executive administrative dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, spoke with the Senate during its last meeting on Sunday about the options that are available to the university.
"I wanted to hear their thoughts about other ways to approach this than doing the whole thing all at once," she said.
McIntosh has discussed the possibility of expanding wireless with other administrators and she feels it will have to come in steps.
"We've talked about taking on the whole project at once," McIntosh said. "It seems to me like it may not be possible."
TCU President Neil DiBiase said he is comfortable with the idea of phasing in the technology piece by piece.
"As long as there's a plan for full-campus wireless, I think it's reasonable," he said.
Any wireless project will face budgetary limitations.
"The budgetary constraints are as much as we face for anything else," McIntosh said. "Tufts has limited resources - every institution does - and if we choose to do one thing, we're inevitably choosing not to do something else."
Some estimates have been as high as $2 million for a campus-wide network, although McIntosh feels that the initiative will probably cost less.
"That's a number that I have been told at different points," she said. "I think that it was a very early estimate and probably not based on as thorough a study as you would want."
Still, the project will certainly be expensive. "I would think to do the entire campus could certainly run to the millions," McIntosh said.
DiBiase said that a final figure will likely not emerge until another study of the campus is done. He agreed that the last one is now outdated.
"Wireless technology has improved tenfold since then," he said.
According to DiBiase, the Senate has "never really developed a plan to [install] wireless in phases."
But senators had a number of ideas Sunday night when challenged by McIntosh to think of an alternate approach.
Some proposed installing wireless in all-freshman dorms first, while others suggested that Sophia Gordon should get priority.
Another idea was the creation of a network for a single region of campus. Other senators felt wireless should go to dorms that have not been renovated recently.
"It sounded like there were a lot of opinions among the Senate at that point," McIntosh said. "There were a number of ideas suggested that I hadn't considered, and so that was very helpful for me."
No plan will be adopted until the costs of each option are determined - a process that McInstosh said will involve Mely Tynan, the vice president and chief information officer for University Information Technology.
McIntosh's and the Senate's efforts come at a time when student interest in wireless is high.
The Senate's latest survey, open from mid-October to early November, asked students to consider whether not having a campus-wide wireless network is an inconvenience to them. Only 7.2 percent of respondents said it is not an inconvenience at all.
DiBiase said these results make sense. "It reaffirms what I've already believed," he said. "Wireless is no longer a luxury on college campuses; it's now the norm."
With that in mind, the Senate has engaged the wireless issue with a research project led by freshmen Chas Morrison and Sam Wallis.
They looked at the wireless options offered by 35 other American schools of comparable size and standing to Tufts.
"All of them have at least some wireless in the dorms," Morrison said. "Not all of them are 100 percent wireless in all the dorms ... but they at least had wireless in the common rooms, for example."
Currently, Tufts has wireless in some academic buildings, the Tisch Library, the campus center, the Academic and Res Quads, and the president's lawn.
There is also some spillover access in dorms near on-campus wireless networks. Morrison said there may also be a negligible amount of intentional access in dorms.
But given the currently restricted access, he feels that Tufts has some catching up to do.
"The question is ... how do we catch up?" he said. "The problem is that we don't have capital to do everything at once, so it's going to have to be step-by-step."
Sophomore Senator Scott Silverman, who has also been working with Morrison and Wallis on the project, plans to form an ad hoc committee next semester to work with McIntosh and Tynan to expand wireless.
"[The next step is] just finding some way to determine which dorms should get wireless first," Silverman said.
