The Undergraduate Student Government (USG) has recently voted to passed an initiative allocating $10,000 to University of Massachusetts Boston’s Information Technology department for the purchase of 40 new wireless Internet access routers. The routers will be installed over the summer in Wheatley Hall and in the Campus Center. Five new routers have already been installed in the Campus Center at the urging of the USG.
Two undergraduate students will install the wireless access points over the summer. The students will be trained in the installation process and paid for their work by the IT Department. Vice Speaker of the Undergraduate Student Senate Yen Phan cooperated with Interim Chief information Officer Apurva Mechta on the purchase of the routers and employment of the students.
“Coming to UMass last fall, I noticed and a lot of my friends had been telling me that it is difficult to connect to the Internet all over campus,” Phan said.  “I started doing surveys and I got hundreds of responses from students stating that access was bad all over campus. We decided to focus on Wheatley because its design is really problematic for Wi-Fi access, and the Campus Center because we got many complaints of poor service.”
Phan began addressing IT issues as an undergraduate student. She is responsible for the placement of three computers in the Science Building in front of the Lipke auditorium, and the printing station that appeared on the first floor of Wheatley this fall.
Mechta became the Interim CIO in summer of 2013. “One of my goals was to open a direct line of communication with students. I wanted to hear first-hand what student concerns were and find ways to improve our service,” Mechta said. “Meeting with the USG and GA told me that wireless access was not prevalent across campus. I was personally surprised by the number of complaints about the Campus Center.”
The wireless access problem is tied to the University’s population growth. Each Wi-Fi access point can support 40 to 50 users reasonably well but beyond that service starts to slow and then basically stop. So the problem in the Campus Center is that the access points that had been installed in the past supported a smaller population.
The IT Department has installed five new Wi-Fi access points in the Campus Center at the urging of co-other of the initiative USG Senator Ben Wellihan. “We wanted to address the accesses problem before finals week. While the administration focuses on growing the school we are focused on the here and now and addressing current student needs,” Wellihan said.
“Population growth is definitely driving the need for more Wi-Fi,” said Metcha. “We are playing catch up [with the Wi-Fi situation] and the demand was too much for us to keep pace with. Free Wi-Fi is expected to be prevalent across campus, but the campus is large and we have to deploy the access points in a strategic manner; in the older buildings this is difficult, but I think we are getting there.”
Both the USG and I.T. Departments are urging offices and individuals not to use personal Wi-Fi access point or “hotspots” because they interfere with the university access point. Both devices send their signals on the same bandwidth creating a lot of traffic and slower service for everyone.