Junior David Changa-Moon rushed from his room in the Multi-Ethnic Center for Cultural Awareness (MECCA) Interest House in frantic pursuit of his lost wireless internet signal. He had been engaged in an important instant-messenger conversation with his girlfriend abroad when the internet suddenly cut out.
“I went to the Fine Arts House and the internet wasn’t working there,” lamented Changa-Moon with a half-smile. “So I went to the Spanish House and the internet wasn’t working there either and when I finally did get on, she had logged off and we didn’t get to have our conversation.”
Poor wireless connection is a big problem at the MECCA and throughout the Interest House Community, said Changa-Moon. As a Resident Advisor (RA), he hears constant groans in reponse to the unreliable wireless signal. “A lot of our residents do complain,” said Changa-Moon. “They tell me that they are just going to go live in the Asian Studies House or something.”
While Changa-Moon asserts that these are just empty threats, it is true that some Interest Houses receive a better connection than others. The German house, said RA Bailey Arend, “has perfect internet and has never had a problem.”
When asked about this descrepency, Kevin Kelly, Director of Network Technology at Whitman, explained that the wireless network is “point-to-point”, meaning that internet access is run through a series of hubs across campus. The German house is one of these hubs and so receives a stronger signal.
Writing House resident John Loranger is frustrated about the state of the internet in the Interest House Community.”I just think it should get taken care of,” said Loranger. “We pay a lot of money to go here and they claim that the entire campus is wireless but, for all intents and purposes, most interest houses aren’t connected.”
Kelly admitted that wireless internet in the Interest Houses is slow. The technology, he said, “is quite old and has proven to be unstable.” Wireless internet was first installed in the Interest House Community in 1999 and has since not been replaced.
Across campus, the wireless connection at many of the fraternities is equally poor. Some Sigma Chi residents have even set up private wireless networks to boost their signal, while others access the internet by way of ethernet ports, which tap directly into Whitman’s network without need of a wireless router. This, they say, is more inconvenient than having a wireless connection. As private institutions, the fraternities are expected to provide themselves with wireless if they want it. Yet most fraternities pay to connect to the Whitman network, which provides them with ethernet access but not a wireless connection.
Plans to overhaul the Interest Houses’ wireless connection are currently set for winter break.”We could do it during the school year,” said Kelly, “but it would take at least a week to get things going again because everything needs to be replaced at the same time.”The upgraded system will support broadband speeds of up to 54 Megabits-per-second, five times as fast as the previous system which can only support up to 11 Megabits-per-second.
