Story by Destinee Marking, Staff writer
Murray State students say they are struggling this semester to connect to Wi-Fi while in their residential colleges.
Keith Weber, chief information officer, said he has not noticed an increase in students reporting problems with Wi-Fi, nor has there been a pattern detected that suggests increased issues in any certain spot on campus.
Weber said most of the reports they do get come from the residential portion of campus.
“Most of them have to do with power outages, or sometimes the network switches and access points don’t always come back up, and they require manual intervention to get them rebooted,” Weber said.
A new ticketing system was introduced last January. Weber said this makes assistance available after hours and on weekends to faculty, staff and students. Anyone who is experiencing issues can go on MyGate and request assistance.
Weber said these reports get routed to a network engineer automatically. He said these reports can be looked at for any patterns there may be.
“This way we can consolidate,” Weber said. “If we have two tickets or three tickets that are all in Hart College, we can handle that at the same time.”
Kai Perkins, junior from Huntsville, Alabama, said she started struggling with connecting to Wi-Fi on the residential college side of campus during the last two weeks.
“Sometimes everything works fine, and other days are a lost cause,” Perkins said.
Perkins had to use a friend’s laptop to complete a homework assignment last week.
“I spent about 20 minutes trying to get my computer to connect,” Perkins said. “I texted my friend to see if he was having issues too, but he said his was working fine. Luckily he wasn’t busy that night or I would’ve had to disrupt his homework to do mine before the due time.”
Perkins said issues like this are inconvenient and make it difficult to finish important tasks.
“I was pretty ticked about my predicament, which makes focusing on math that much harder,” Perkins said. “It took me longer to finish my assignment than it would have normally.”
Perkins said she has not yet reported any issues to the service desk.
Like Perkins, Kaitlyn Prow, freshman from Providence, Kentucky, said she has also been experiencing difficulties with the Wi-Fi connection on the residential college side of campus, since the beginning of the semester.
She said she has had to use data in order to use her cellphone, making her phone bill increase recently.
In addition to that worry, Prow said the complications have made doing school work harder.
“I get very frustrated while trying to do homework or do anything on my computer while in my room,” Prow said. “It’s very aggravating since I am paying so much money to attend school here.”
Prow said she has not reported her issues to the service desk.
To report any issues, Weber urges people to call the service desk or use the service catalog on MyGate.