The university devoted $660,000 to tackle the first of these issues — maintaining connections — by the end of this year.
The student population has soared by 40 percent, to 24,500, since 2000, when only 60 people had signed on to the campus Wi-Fi system. The system has failed to keep up.
On the third day of classes, for example, freshman Caitlin Dieni had needed to print her assignments but couldn't get to them because the wireless system wouldn't connect.
Dieni picked up her smartphone and tweeted her exasperation: "ALL I WANT TO DO IS CONNECT TO THE FREAKING INTERNET. OMG. I FREAKING HATE UO WIRELESS. #havehomework #needinternet"
"Watching TV and movies on a WiFi device, that is at most five years old. Those take a lot of bandwidth," said Professor Andrzej Proskurowski of the UO computer science department.
It's a "device explosion," according to EDUCAUSE, the Colorado-based association representing higher education chief information officers. Bandwidth congestion is the No. 1 problem that IT officials face on campuses across the country, according to the organization's annual survey.
"Take your lawn irrigation system in the neighborhood," Proskurowski said. "It's warm, and everybody is watering their lawns and the pressure drops.
"That's what you experience on the first day of school when everybody wants to register, check this and check that, send an email to Mama — 'I arrived and I'm fine' — and there is limited capacity of the pipe of the Wi-Fi," he said.
via WiFiNovation | Scoop.it
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