[posted to Xanga 9/7/10]
...or, Why Freed-Hardeman's iKnow Program is Crap part 2.
In a nutshell? We have the worst internet connection EVER.
Around half the people in our dorm, Bradfield, regularly get only two or three bars of wifi, if they're lucky. The rest are apparently positioned closer to a router/bridge. I'm told that it is much the same in the other dorms. Even in Bradfield's lobby the wifi is terrible. The wifi in the cafeteria is even worse. I have to toggle my AirPort card on and off every few minutes to get internet in here. The student center under the cafeteria is similarly bad. Yes, I've tried sitting all over the rooms to see if there are any better spots, and there aren't. We get varying degrees of wifi in classrooms; you have roughly a 50-50 chance that you'll get decent wifi when you go to class. Maybe higher in Brown-Kopel, because that's where the IT department is located, and it's the only place in the school that I can think of right now with consistently decent wifi.
And that's not the half of it.
I'm one of few students in the school in possession of an ethernet cable and the requisite knowledge to use it. (I think one other person on my hall has ethernet, unless she moved out.) Every time I go to my room, I plug in. I'm in one of the rooms that usually has fairly decent wifi in terms of bars, but even so, when Skype lags and gets pixelly and slow and awful, it inevitably improves the moment I plug in the ethernet (even if it's only a little). The fastest I've ever seen anything download on campus over an http/ftp connection is 1 mbps, and I've done my fair share of downloading huge files, as it is rather necessary to do so when trying out new VirtualBox virtual machines.
It gets worse.
Every day, the internet goes down at least once. Completely down. Generally the network goes down with it, but not always. During the worst episodes, I can't even get an IP from the server--"self-assigned IP" is something I'm very used to seeing in my Network Settings. What's worse, generally these outages are not in the middle of the night, as you might think maintenance outages would be, but during waking hours, during the afternoon and evening. Most days it goes down multiple times.
Freed, this is unacceptable. We pay you a steep technology fee every single semester. You are a college; by ANY standards you should have decent internet access. And what's more, you give us homework on Blackboard. Not every class does, but quite a few of them do, and if it's not Blackboard it's internet-requiring research. And the much-vaunted iKnow program, one of the main tools Freed uses to market itself, is all about CONNECTIVITY.
Oh, and when we do have internet it's filtered and controlled. Not that I'd expect aught else from Freed.
Just another reason I'll be glad to turn my back on this place.
