Cable Guise

Walker, Texas Ranger or Touched By An Angel? Now Dartmouth students can stop fighting over the remote. Computing Services and the Office of Residential Life have made cable service available in residence halls. Over the past two years every dorm room was wired with a capacity for cable as part of an upgrading project which also included improving the telephone lines and installing high-speed Ethernet data connections. "It's fantastic," says James Gallo '99, area coordinator of Topliff, the first dorm to go cable. "People were worried that the dorm would be less social but nothing has changed, except that now we have the option of watching TV in our rooms." The cable package contains 13 channels: ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, C-SPAN, Public Access, as well as five foreign-language or international stations, the NASA channel, and a bulletin-board channel for Dartmouth original programming. A more expansive selection, which could include Fox, ESPN, MTV, CNN, or even premium channels, is being looked into, but financial considerations will likely keep it from being implemented in the near future.

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