by Gina Christo, News Editor
Last week, many Wooster students received an event request on Facebook titled “Petition for the College of Wooster to Fix the Internet.” Robin Hirtle ’11, had decided she was fed up with the slow Internet on campus and used the social networking website to bring attention to the issue.
The group quickly gained momentum, with many students joining the event and commenting on the page. Jason Weingart ’12, who is currently working on his Junior I.S., said loading PDFs for his research could be nearly impossible because of the slow Internet. Additionally, his Junior I.S advisor, Professor Atay, unable to leave Cyprus, and meetings with him via Skype are particularly difficult because the bandwidth is not capable of holding the connection.
Chris Carpenter ’12 took the Facebook group initiative to the next level and brought his concerns to a Campus Council meeting. Carpenter was frustrated far before the group was created and started to run nightly speed tests to father data for further actions. The Facebook petition gave him an opportunity to share his research with his fellow peers and get them fired up about an issue he had long been passionate about.† When Hirtle was invited to attend the campus council meeting, she got in touch with Carpenter and had him go as a technological diplomat who could speak accurately and honestly for all of the students.
The Internet speed at Wooster is a two-fold issue. First, the only allows for a certain number of licenses to be active at one time. So as long as only a certain number of people are online at one time, the campus Internet connection is fine. Students run into problems during high activity times, such as later in the evenings when students are working on homework or relaxing and watching Netflix. Because of the increase of wireless devices on campus this year, the connection is often over the limit, leading to students losing their connection.
The second issue is the slower Internet speed on campus. During prime Internet use time, the campus has been reaching 150 mb/s connection. If the college are requesting 160 mb/s and he capacity is only 150mb/s the Internet speed gets significantly slower. Video streaming takes up much of the bandwidth, whether they come from YouTube, Hulu or NetFlix. Cell phones and gaming consoles use do take up some of the connection, but it is not believed to be a main player in the slow internet like videos are.
According to an e-mail sent out by the Dean of Students last Friday, Campus Council and SGA have been working with staff in the Office of Information Technology to develop long-term solutions to the significant increase in use of wireless technologies. To show this to the student body, they put together a panel to present last Tuesday night in the Lowry Student Center.
The panel consisted of both students and faculty who had a through knowledge of the Internet issue from a technical aspect as well as a social aspect. Student representatives included SGA president Hannah Haas ’12, Campus Council Chair Bastiaan van de Lagemaat ’11† and at large Campus Council member Kevin Carpenter. Information Technology faculty who came in were Vince Di Scipio Director of Digital Infrastructure and Ellen Falduto Chief Information and Planning.
Di Scipio did most of the talking, and addressed both the active licences issue as well as the internet speed through the bandwidth size.
The wireless connection in regard to the allowed number of active licenses has been addressed by IT already. Initially, the college only had 2,400 license and that has now been increased to 4,096. By adding about 2,000 more not only has it fixed the issue, but also it has left some wiggle room for the network to grow.
In terms of Internet speed, this is an issue that will be addressed over time. In the short term, this Thursday Morning the Internet speed will be increased from 150 mb/s to 200 mb/s as a temporary fix. This summer, the Information Technology staff will be reevaluating the network hardware that does traffic management and looking to see how they can generally improve the Internet on campus.