When I heard President Jackson promise the Student Senate in Fall 2003 that by the following fall every academic building on campus would be wireless-capable, I was thrilled, because I figured that if she was making the pledge in public, then it would have to be followed through. Unfortunately, it is now months past the original deadline, and this project is obviously incomplete.
All too often over the past couple weeks, my friends, my professors, random people I have heard grumbling behind me in class, and I have had connections dropped every few minutes or just plain unavailable at often crucial times. When a professor is trying to access lecture notes in the DCC and must stop class to wait for his connection to re-establish, or when I’m working on a project remotely and must start over when I lose access, or when the guy behind me can’t play Text-Twist in class because the VPN is being finicky again, there’s a problem.
Wireless capability on this campus is almost a joke for an institution of this type and caliber, and anyone who looks at our “marketbasket schools” will have to agree. Carnegie Mellon University, for example, blanketed their entire campus with wireless access years ago. Anywhere on campus, including in the middle of campus fields, students or professors can access the network and do their work. This trend continues if you move beyond universities. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that if I can access wireless in a McDonald’s, I can keep a connection in a Sage lecture hall for more than a minute.
In light of this, I’m sure I was not the only one who was surprised last fall when it was announced that RPI had been honored as the Most Connected Campus by the Princeton Review, something the school has bragged about over the past few months. I looked over their methodology, however, and I have to say that I was unimpressed. It seemed like the questions more befitted a survey asked five years ago. I also looked over Intel’s response to the survey, the “Most Unwired College Campuses” (most wireless, not most un-connected), and did not find RPI anywhere on the list. I don’t mean to be insulting to other schools, but this latter list included such storied technological institutions as West Virginia University and the University of Idaho. Union College, the Clarkson to our football team, beat us twice in one season by making this list. “Getting our name out there” is a big goal of this administration, and I think being left off lists like this is an embarrassment.
It’s true that wireless capability is already being worked on; indeed, it’s being extended to the dorms as you read this and in the upcoming weeks. This should be accompanied by further expansion, as promised, of the wireless connectivity on the academic side of campus. Just like other schools, students and professors should be able to (reliably) access the network from any lecture hall, classroom, or lab, or on warm days from the middle of any of the quads. I hope that by next fall, this can be worked on and remedied. This is obviously a big project, but a necessary one.
