Cable in Dorms Unlikely To Fly

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences Information Technology Department has rejected the latest proposal by a student entrepreneur to feed cable television into dorm rooms via the Internet, according to Undergraduate Council members.

The proposal, drafted by Nicholas J. Castine ’09 on behalf of his business, Crimson Cable, called for a trial program for 100 students using Slingboxes, which would pipe cable television from Internet bandwidth in high-speed-equipped Buffalo, N.Y. to Harvard’s non-wireless Ethernet network.

Harvard is the only Ivy League school that does not provide standard cable access in its dorms. Only dormitories at 10 and 20 DeWolfe St. and Pforzheimer House’s Jordan complex are currently equipped with cable.

FAS IT rejected the plan primarily because of concerns about overflow traffic onto the University’s already crowded wireless network, said Undergraduate Council President Matthew L. Sundquist ’09 at last evening’s UC meeting. Sundquist said that FAS IT would block Internet feeds for students who attempted to use the Slingbox service.

The IT department, he said, wants to wait for renovation of upper-class houses to begin before gutting the Houses to install new cable wires. In addition, Sundquist said that administrators were concerned about cable television being provided by a student’s private company.

Now that the plan has been rejected, moving forward with cable television looks unlikely. No Undergraduate Council members have signed up to pursue the issue so far this school year. UC Vice President Randall S. Sarafa ’09 said he is awaiting the outcome of discussion between University Information Services and FAS IT.

But UC members were not hopeful about administration approval.

“Cable does not seem like a tenable at this point,” Sundquist said.

The recent draft is the latest by Castine to be rejected by the administration. Castine, who formed Crimson Cable in the fall of 2006, did not comment on the rejection, but said he was working on another proposal. Though he is working privately, he has been supported by Sundquist and Sarafa.

Participating in the pilot program would have cost students $110 for a Slingbox and $55 each month for service, which could have been split among friends and roommates. Some students already use Slingboxes to tap into their home cable service, but individual boxes are more costly than those under Castine’s proposal.

UC representatives said that students are enthusiastic about the possibility of cable service. Charles T. James ’10, a UC representative from Leverett House, said that 60 percent of the students he surveyed listed cable television in dorms as one of their top three wishes for improvements in campus life.

But several students said they would prefer better concerts or paper copies of newspapers to cable service. “A lot of television now can be streamed online,” Jeremy Y. Feng ’12 said. “I don’t know if cable would justify the costs.”

—Staff writer Alex M. McLeese can be reached at amcleese@fas.harvard.edu.