Augustana students and faculty received an email from ITS on Aug. 31 about a new, better wireless network on campus, but as the school year progresses, students have yet to see these improvements and struggle with unreliable Wi-Fi. After arriving for the new school year, it was disappointing to learn that AC1, the new Wi-Fi network, had not improved students’ internet use.

The first dilemma with the new internet is the connection process. The login for AC1 is difficult. One must connect through Onboarding, a different school “network” that only aids in finding AC1 on a device. I had to repeat this step multiple times throughout the first weeks of school because it kept disconnecting. 

GuestsofAugustana and GameConsolesAC will remain available when trying to connect to on-campus Wi-Fi, but will be renamed to ACGuests and ACIoT, as stated in the August 31 email from Chris Vaughan, chief information officer. AugieWifi(Secured) and OpenAugieWifi will eventually disappear, leaving fewer backup options for students having trouble with AC1.

Old Main is a dead zone for any wi-fi signal. Occasionally it will connect for a few minutes at a time, but most of the time I have no internet in class. My professor can use Google Slides, play videos and open internet links with no issues during class, but my classmates and I are unable to pull up the reading of the day on our computers. This makes it difficult to complete classwork or in-class assignments, possibly impacting our academic performance.

The unreliable Wi-Fi negatively impacts students. As a commuter student, I prefer to stay on campus between classes to do homework rather than drive back and forth. However, since the start of AC1, it has been difficult to find places to study on campus where I have a reliable internet connection. 

Last year, the school Wi-Fi was spotty and difficult to connect to, but I found it was more reliable than AC1. I have had classes in buildings such as Lindberg, Old Main and even the basement of Denkmann, where the Wi-Fi signal last year was comparatively stronger than AC1. I cannot connect to AC1 at Gus’ Snack Bar for lunch, where I used to do homework last year. The signal on AugieWifi(Secured) was better than the new internet connection. As someone who commutes, I find it’s best to do work at home rather than face the unreliability of the AC1 Wi-Fi.

The poor Wi-Fi could be due to underlying issues that students might not consider. According to an email from Vaughan sent to the entire student body, the new wireless connection is meant to “create greater visibility for our support teams to identify and address bandwidth and network bottlenecks.” This would make the network better able to accommodate many students on Wi-Fi at the same time, but whether this works to improve reliability is hard to prove. 

We are only a few weeks into the semester, and I have already had a professor give an extension on an assignment to the entire class because there was no Wi-Fi at all. This should not be a problem that professors have to deal with daily, as it impacts their ability to teach and our ability to learn. The unreliability of the Wi-Fi impacts students academically during and after class, as students who live on-campus struggle to do homework due to the network. As a commuter, I have Wi-Fi options, but this is not the case for the majority of Augustana’s students. 

Augustana could provide students with multiple networks throughout different areas of campus in order to create a more even distribution of signal throughout all of the buildings. Perhaps creating separate Wi-Fi connections for students and faculty would help the reliability of the internet on-campus.

Augustana students need reliable Wi-Fi, and they are not getting it through AC1.