Wifi is a significant part of our campus life. It enables teachers and students to easily access the network, visit D2L to do our homework, or various resources on the Internet wherever they have electronic devices. However, GU‘s wifi is not so good recently, and many students are complaining about it. Therefore, several students who live in different dorm buildings gave insight about the wifi at school.
In an interview with Shubin Ma, who lives in Kinney Hall, she said if she could rate the campus network on a scale of 0 to 5, she wouldn’t hesitate to say 0. “When I am playing a video game, the speed of the Internet will suddenly slow down, so I can’t play my game very well. This forces me to hang up games frequently. Occasionally I can’t even log in D2L and hand in my homework due to the school network being so bad,” said Ma.
Chen Wang, who lives in Janssen Hall, was also interviewed. He gave two good points about the school’s wifi. He was satisfied with the wifi in his dorm and felt very stable, but he was not satisfied with the network in other places. “When I study on the first floor of the library I cannot connect to the wifi. I only can connect to the one on the fourth floor. Some places where I don’t have Internet access include many of the buildings where classes are held. Due to this phenomenon, most of the time my computer is useless in class.”
IT Support worker, David Hunter, explained some of the issues with the connection. As for the problems with the campus network, he told me that Greenville University changed the cooperative company to be in charge of the school network. Dynamic Campus is a company that provides IT service for specifically higher education institutions like Greenville. “We are working on the solution right now. We also found a bug in the access points in the firmware, so we have been working on getting that fixed recently. We are also going to be moving the placement of some of them so that we have consistent coverage in all the buildings. There are three or four solutions we are in the midst of getting done,” said Hunter.
When discussing what the IT department will be doing to fix the network problem, Hunter stated, “Our first step will be moving some of those access points around to the optimal location. The second step is configuration. The third step is a firmware bug. We are working on all of these at once, so you’re going to be seeing improvements in every building. All we have to do is fix everything one step at a time.”
In general, the campus network is one of the standards to promote our beautiful campus life. Every GU student hopes that the campus network can be faster and more stable, but we can’t be impatient about such things. Greenville has and will continue to improve the wifi according to students needs.
