Cassy Kaplan sits in her dorm room in Burke East with her laptop tethered to the wall with an Ethernet cable because, she says, the cable makes the Internet more efficient.
“Sometimes the Internet is fast, and then it will be slow for the next few hours,” said Kaplan, a freshman majoring in public relations. “I just prefer to plug it in the wall, because it is faster that way.”
Kaplan said she feels the Internet is much faster and the connection is better in the classrooms than in the dorms.
Christina Frantom, the director of public relations for the Office of Information Technology, said, “Some residents may be experiencing problems with the network because some residents are bringing in wireless routers and these are not permitted.”
“We have a total of 75 rogue access points that signal to us that there are routers in the area,” she said. “This is a substantial amount, and the routers have the ability to affect service.”
She said OIT is trying to get the message out to students that these routers are not permitted and they have the ability to reduce and affect the quality of service.
Although students have concerns, the number of calls to OIT does not show that the Internet service quality differs any from last year.
“The number of calls reporting outages to the OIT has been down from last year,” Frantom said.
“About 95 percent of the time the Internet is good and the other 5 percent it is upsetting,” said Lakeithia Stoves, a resident in Bryce Lawn and a junior majoring in biology.
She said that she thinks the Internet connection seems slightly worse than last year when she lived on campus.
“It knocks me off every now and then,” Stoves said. “It’s not slow, but I will lose connection sometimes.”
With enrollment topping 30,000 students, there are more students using the UA network on various devices than ever before. Frantom said OIT is trying to accommodate this increased number of students, faculty and staff that are using the Internet on campus.
“At the beginning of the year, everyone who has a device that they will be using on the network has to re-register to be able to use the Internet,” she said. “This is used to account for the new student and those who did not return for another year.”
She said this is also a security feature that the University uses for their network.
UA ResNet is on a different network than the campus Wi-Fi, but both networks are undergoing growth, build-outs and expansion, she said.
The Office of Information Technology will be starting a $1.5 million wireless expansion project that will equip every classroom building on campus with wireless Internet. Ultimately, all buildings on campus should have wireless Internet access by the end of December.
“For the wireless expansion project, we are constantly making updates to the OIT website as each new building becomes wired,” Frantom said.
