By fall, all students living in residence halls will be able to hang up the idea of dialing onto the Internet.

On the sixth and final phase of the six-year project, the last remaining residence halls will be connected to the Ethernet by fall.

The dorms to be completed are Snyder, Phillips, Landon, Yakeley, Gilchrist and Mayo halls.

And that’s good news for Amy Abraham, a general business administration freshman who lives in Yakeley.

She can’t wait for her Ethernet - a high-speed Internet connection that needs no phone line.

“Right now it is really inconvenient because my roommate and I take turns using the phone line for the Internet - and it is just one of the problems we have to deal with,” Abraham said. “It will definitely be a better improvement for the dorm.”

The project has taken six years to complete because university officials prefer waiting until the summers to wire dorms, as there are far less students on campus that could be inconvenienced by the work.

Plus, the project cost $11 million - not exactly a drop in the bucket, said Dick Sigelko, manager of automated systems in Housing and Food Services.

“We didn’t have $11 million up-front at the beginning,” Sigelko said, adding that wiring the whole campus couldn’t have been completed in one year.

The project was funded from students’ room-and-board dollars, said Barry Latoszewski, the manager of Construction Maintenance and Interior Design.

He said six years ago when the project originally began, priority was given to different halls for the order of the first to receive the connections.

“We looked in terms of what would be most logical,” Latoszewski said. “The first hall we did was Holmes because they had a very large residential college and at that time the largest percentage of students using computers in rooms.”

Also, the newer dorms were wired before the older buildings, because it was easier, he said.

Latoszewski said all students will greatly benefit from the Ethernet, even though many students without the connection can now head to computer labs.

“The new advantage will be students not having to trot down the hall or use their modem to get online,” Latoszewski said.

Once all the residence halls have been completed, the upgrades in technology will not stop there, he said. The university will then begin improving the speed of the hall connections to the Internet.

“We’re going to change the magnitude, and get up to 10 times faster than what we have now,” Latoszewski said.

Rachel Wright can be reached at wrightr9@msu.edu.