Since the beginning of the semester, students residing in 20 separate woodframe houses have reported extreme difficulty in accessing the University’s Internet network. While ITS is still actively addressing these complaints, the problem has not been entirely resolved.

“Our lack of internet is really debilitating to our schoolwork and our Wesleyan existence, since nowadays so much is done on Blackboard, through e-mail, or through professors’ individual websites,” said Christy Wurmstedt ’07, a resident of 59 Pearl St.

Wurmstedt and her housemates have dealt with an unreliable network since they moved in on Aug. 31, and waited for two weeks before ITS came by to investigate the problem.

Associate Vice President for Information Technology Services Ganesan Ravishanker acknowledged that response time at the ITS Help desk, run by students, had been less than ideal during the hectic Drop/Add period. He explained that there were significant complexities in monitoring the network that services the woodframe houses.

“The houses’ network and cable modems are controlled by Comcast, which is much more difficult for us to monitor than the on-campus network,” Ravishanker said.

The task of wiring the University’s woodframe houses has consistently been a challenge for ITS. Whereas all campus buildings were collectively wired in a major telecommunications project in 1992-1993, it proved too complicated and expensive to extend this service to the woodframes because they are interspersed with non-University-owned houses. Alternatively, ITS engaged the private telephone service SNET (now SBC) to provide residents of woodframe houses with dial-up modems to access the school network.

Students became accustomed to the faster on-campus network access and found the dial-up modem system too slow. In 1998, ITS contracted Comcast to supply the woodframe houses with cable modem access, which yielded faster, but more inconsistent, network connections. After a brief and unsatisfactory experience with DSL in 2003, ITS again turned to Comcast to wire the woodframe houses.

This past summer, significant improvements were made to the houses’ network accessibility. In addition to the new Linksys routers already installed by ITS, Comcast provided all woodframe houses with advanced Motorola cable modems. ITS also expanded network coverage so that an average of only five students share a single cable modem.

Improvements also include the installation of a remote power switch in the kitchen or living room of every woodframe house.

“Many network issues can be solved by restarting the router and cable modems in the house basements,” Ravishanker said. “But since ResLife’s safety policy prevents students from going into their basements, ITS help desk staff used to have to make an appointment and physically go to every house to reset the hardware. Thanks to the remote power switches, students can now reset it themselves.”

There are also a number of steps that residents can take first to investigate for themselves why their connectivity may be limited, he said. Firstly, students should refrain from file-sharing operations that clog the system, as well as regularly check for computer viruses. Residents should also keep in mind that microwave ovens and 2.4 GHz cordless telephones tend to upset wireless routers, but that connections should resume once these appliances are turned off.

In most cases, resetting the remote power switch should reestablish connectivity. Doing so more than five times a day warrants a call to the help desk.

Still, as of Sept. 20, four houses still reported network problems. These persistent issues seem to imply that the larger network system may be at fault.

Wurmstedt reported that, even after ITS had installed the living room router box, the network did not function properly in her house.

“The problem is the system that is set up, not the router box,” Wurmstedt said.

Ravishanker, too, expressed concern about communication, but specifically between residents and ITS.

“Although students report problems to us, they don’t tell us when the problem has been resolved,” Ravishanker said. “If we knew that an issue had been taken care of, fewer resources would be wasted trying to find this out from the students who reported the problem in the first place. We as technologists are doing everything we can under the circumstances, but if students have any ideas, we are more than happy to hear them.”