Can You Connect?

Posted by Ryan Sindon in Campus

Tyler King, a member of the IT staff, working in his office.

Complaints about the wifi on campus are a common refrain for SFUAD students. Although students received an email Sept. 2 asking for patience and promising a remedy for internet issues, student sentiment remains largely unchanged regarding connection issues.

Jackalope spoke with the Information Technology Department several times since the start of the semester. Department employees maintain there is enough bandwidth and capacity to accommodate students on the network.

“Students are averaging 250 megabytes per second a day. The full bandwidth is 600 megabytes per second, and students are nowhere near it,” Joshua Billiter, the residential network system administrator, says. “The fact that it’s sluggish is because of network engineering conflicts that we have since worked out.”

In other terms, at the time of various interviews with IT, 1,218 different devices were connected to the school’s internet. That number represents Xboxes, Playstations, computers, phones, tablets—any device connected to the hardwire internet in the dorms, and anything else with any wifi connectivity. The hardwire internet, IT student employee Dylan Marlow says, “generally does not make internet faster because we give you 100 megabytes per second in your room, and typically a computer doesn’t work that fast.” However, students who “game a lot,” he says, may find use for the hardwire, as it’s “more reliable.”

IT says it is finding that often problems faced by students are individual user issues unrelated to the campus wifi.

“It can be the student’s computer, or how many applications are running,” Jeff Pearce, IT director says. “Students can be exhausting their own resources, and until we come and visit students, their problems may not be fixed.”

As such, IT asks for students to submit a work order, and IT will set a time between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. “to do a room call, and see what students are physically trying to do, so that we can find where the issues arise, and fix from there,” Marlow says.

IT’s house call service has been marketed to students since move in day. Still, some students like Fibiola Arana say they still can’t connect. “I can’t even get on to Resnet, so I have to find a place to connect. Right now I’m using my friend’s computer because I can’t connect.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Jeff Pearce’s name. Jackalope regrets the error.