Wireless Satisfaction On The Rise

While students with laptops frequently complain of spotty wireless signals and weak connections in their dorm rooms, the most recent computer service survey indicates that wireless satisfaction has increased substantially among the student body.

The 2007-2008 survey’s report on wireless and wired connectivity shows that 23 percent of students are very satisfied with their connections and 49 percent were satisfied. Only 13 percent said they were dissatisfied. The numbers represent an improvement from last year, when almost a third of the student body expressed dissatisfaction with wireless, and only 14 percent were very satisfied.

Noah S. Selsby, a staffer for FAS Information Technology (IT), attributes this improvement to FAS IT’s continuous effort to fix wireless problems on campus. A common gripe of Harvard students regarding wireless connectivity in the past is the perceived discrepancy between the river houses and the Quad.

For example, in last year’s survey, Adams House reported 36 percent dissatisfied and 16 percent very dissatisfied with wireless, showing a majority unhappy with their Internet connections. President of the Harvard Computer Society (HCS) Joshua A. Kroll ’09, who lives in Adams, said he used a desktop computer most of the time to avoid wireless woes.

“I had to wire a very long piece of Ethernet wire under my roommate’s rug to the common room,” he said.

But this year’s survey shows that the dissatisfaction rate in Adams has plummeted to 16 percent, a 36 percent drop from last year.

Though all the Houses improved on the whole in terms of wireless satisfaction, Quad Houses still show the highest levels of satisfaction, with Cabot House reporting a full 83 percent of students satisfied.

Pforzheimer House and Currier House showed satisfaction rates of 74 and 70 percent, respectively.

Though the lowest levels of satisfaction were reported on the River—48 percent in Dunster, 56 percent at Adams, and 59 percent at Kirkland—some River Houses, like Lowell at 70 percent and Winthrop at 74 percent, reported satisfaction rates on par with the Quad Houses.

Selsby said that the actual reports of wireless problems to the help desk show no “actual difference” between the River and the Quad.

Kroll said there are theories within the HCS on what causes occasional bad signals and slow speeds in certain River Houses.

“Basically the wires in the wall, even though they can support higher speeds, are all tuned to a lower speed, we think, to avoid certain kinds of problems,” Kroll said. “We’re not completely sure why, but we know that this happens.”

Kroll criticized the antiquity and spatial design of the river houses for the paucity of wireless access points to cover all the physical spaces and attributed the general satisfaction with wireless in the Quad to the fact that its buildings are more “regularly shaped.”

Selsby blames the “problem areas” of wireless on areas of “extreme traffic” rather than poor design or FAS IT’s intent.

Kroll added that some of the problem may be due to the fact that Harvard apparently doesn’t own enough network addresses to accommodate all the students that want access to the network. “My suggestion is that Harvard try to buy some from MIT,” Kroll said.

Data from this year’s survey could be limited by the fact that it bases its assessment of wireless connectivity satisfaction on responses from 1,908 students, whereas the 2006-2007 survey had a data supply of 2,949 responses—over 50 percent more.

But Selsby said that last year’s response rate was “an all-time high” and that the “sample size and distributions across concentrations still make the data valid” for this year.

He said that FAS IT, in addition to holistic renovation, usually tackles problem area by problem area based on student calls.

If wireless problems go unresolved in areas, “it may be that they’re not calling us, which is part of the problem,” he said.

Selsby declined to comment on FAS IT’s budget plan for fixing wireless problems and renovations.

He did acknowledge the drift of the student body towards wireless-only use as “unexpected.”

“Wireless wasn’t intended to replace wired when it was made, so as such it wasn’t funded to be a complete replacement of everybody’s wired connection in their room,” he explained.

“The network was kind of designed for a different load than it is now,” Kroll added.

—Staff writer Vidya B. Viswanathan can be reached at viswanat@fas.harvard.edu.

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