When I still owned my PC, I had an Ethernet cable I would plug in to the wall of my dorm room and use whenever the WiFi was down on campus.

Since I bought my Mac in January, I kept forgetting to purchase a new one. Now I have to suffer like the rest of campus whenever the WiFi goes down, especially with the most recent outage.

Since Sept. 6, many students have had trouble connecting to the WiFi in their residence halls. Not only do I have to worry about the WiFi on my computer, but also on my phone because I don’t want to waste data just to go on social media. The night I couldn’t connect on my laptop or phone was a nightmare. I was dying of absolute boredom, aside from reading my textbooks and going to sleep. The next morning when I went to CTS to see if something was wrong with my laptop, the technician told me to keep trying to log in and to restart my computer.

There are two different networks under Oswego-Secure that students can connect to on campus: Oswego-Secure for academic buildings and Oswego-Secure-RES for residence halls. Whenever the WiFi goes down in the dorms, everyone makes a run for it to either the library or Campus Center to finish their papers or homework.

Why is it that Res Life’s WiFi always seems to be a problem?

So many people are connected to it at one time. Therefore, outages and spotty WiFi are more likely to happen. I’ve been so used to having an external router in my house and sharing it among four other people. Whenever the WiFi stopped working in my house, I automatically assumed either the Internet was down in the entire county or the modem needed to be restarted. I keep imagining there is this giant modem hidden somewhere in Culkin that controls all of the WiFi in the residence halls. All the technicians need to do is hit a switch to restart it. On Sept. 8, there was brief outage in all the residence halls except Scales and Waterbury. However, it didn’t solve the problem. Technicians had to go to every residence hall and manually fix the hardware.    

While it seems like more of a challenge, I think there should be separate routers for each residence hall to use. That way, you’re sharing WiFi with 500 people instead of 5,000. Each student connects to a certain WiFi in their residence hall and all they have to do is use the password for the dorm to connect. Now, let’s say you live in Seneca, but want to hang out with your friends in Cayuga, you would just ask for the Cayuga password. It is that simple. The upside of it is there would be less outages and spotty WiFi affecting the entire campus. The downside is the costs and complications about the passwords for each hall.

The most bothersome technological problem at Oswego State, besides the lack of phone service in some parts of the Campus Center, is the flickering WiFi. When the WiFi goes down, everyone who lives on campus is affected. I think I’d better start looking at prices for an Ethernet cable for my Mac if I’m going to survive the next seven months.