The Badger Herald

OPINION & EDITORIAL

Wireless Outages remove studious spark from College Library

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Also by Rachel Krystek:

Bulimia, anorexia too grave to ignore (October 23, 2007)
Write, don't whine over teaching assistants (November 20, 2007)
Wireless Outages remove studious spark from College Library (November 6, 2007)
Storm water runoff a serious issue for students (October 9, 2007)
Stop gawking, treat athletes equally (September 25, 2007)

by Rachel Krystek

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Access to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s wireless system should be as simple as the name implies: no strings attached. However, over the past few weeks, several frustration-filled nights at College Library have led me to believe that access isn’t as easy as suggested. Repeated failure to connect to UW-Madison’s wireless leaves laptop users with lingering doubt in a system meant to accommodate more than 12,000 students and 6,000 faculty members.

Providing a large college campus such as UW-Madison with wireless Internet is a daunting task. Brian Rust of UW-Madison’s Division of Information Technology explains how the system is set up using “Wireless Access Point radios (APs), which are installed in strategic locations within each campus building. The APs connect to the campus network equipment through Cat5e cabling in each building.” The average campus building has two or three access points, which are then wired to the central system, breaking the campus wireless system into 123 manageable access sites. According to Mr. Rust, by the end of the year, 100 percent of eligible campus buildings will be connected to the campus wireless system, a project that began in 2004. Innovation breeds unforeseen complications, however, and despite UWNet’s campuswide coverage, accessing the network is often challenging. The Division of Information Technology’s website explains: “To connect to the network with campus wireless, simply use your wireless client application “

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Anonymous (November 6, 2007 @ 8:19pm):

If you have trouble doing this, come up and ask someone a question at a help desk, don't just write an article hating on college library. It's not like the wireless itself just completely crashes all the time- get a second opinion from someone who gets paid to do this.

Anonymous (November 7, 2007 @ 9:34am):

"It is clear then..."

I think it's great that Rachel has taken her time out from being a wireless technology and networking expert to do such an in-depth analysis and come up with a solution to this (surely quite simple) problem.

Hopefully DoIT and the student population will give her opinions all the consideration they are due.

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