EDITORIAL: Wireless problems must be reported

If you live on campus — or even if you don’t — you’ve probably noticed the less-than-ideal state of the University’s wireless performance over the past month or so. Between multiple prompts to enter student credentials and many laptops’ occasional inability to detect any of the two University networks, students are understandably agitated at their lack of connectivity on a supposedly wireless campus.

However, let’s put away our proverbial pitchforks and torches for a minute. How many times have you called the help desk or gone to the TechZone when your Internet was acting up? 

Did you provide UNIT with the requisite information for them to diagnose the problem and then follow up at a later date? Chances are that with the frequency of the problems, you have not done so for every occasion.

Yet it is exactly because of this that UNIT has taken so long to realize there was an issue in the system. We know now that the root cause of the trouble was a bug in the system, which UNIT is now working to fix.

However, the problem could have been detected much earlier in the semester, and the blame for that falls on us as much as it falls on UNIT. 

For a problem that it seems a large percentage of campus is experiencing, only six students made specific reports about it over the first weekend that UNIT detected a problem. Whatever your personal experiences with the TechZone or help desk may be, the fact remains that UNIT cannot do anything to help without consistent student feedback. 

Maintaining a fully wired campus requires the talent and dedication of a large group of people over in UNIT, and problems will come up when upward of 6,000 people can be trying to stay connected at any given time. But the best way to make sure these bugs get fixed as quickly as possible isn’t to merely complain: It’s to give constructive feedback as often as possible.