Waynesburg University’s campus-wide Wi-Fi is beginning to spread to its surrounding graduate campuses in the Pittsburgh area. More specifically, the Monroeville and Southpointe locations for the university are ready to launch the same Wi-Fi that students, faculty and staff have been using since the beginning of this semester.
According to William Dumire, vice president for Information Technology Services and chief information officer, even though the equipment and installation of the Wi-Fi system is ready to go, ITS opted to hold off until the end of this graduate semester.
“All of the equipment and all of installation is done at [the graduate] campuses, but we have not turned on new Wi-Fi yet,” said Dumire. “We did not want to disrupt graduate student’s semester by having them switch over. When students come back from Christmas break, they will have the new wireless.”
From the start, ITS wanted to roll out the new Wi-Fi in phases, starting with the undergraduate campus. Once everything was running smoothly on Waynesburg’s main campus, the idea was to start rolling it out to the graduate campuses.
“[We wanted to] make sure the bandwidth was appropriate for undergraduate students,” Dumire said. “Once that was under control, we would apply that to the remote campuses. We wanted to get undergraduate connected and then scale it to next campus. [From there, we will] turn on at [one] campus first, evaluate it for a few days, make sure bandwidth is appropriate and then go to next campus.”
One of the biggest problems Dumire foresees when the Wi-Fi is activated is that there are not full-time, regular members of ITS always available at the remote campuses. However, they plan to send representatives to help students with activating their devices and making sure everything runs smoothly at first.
“We don’t have full time support staff at the remote campuses,” said Dumire. We are going to rotate and send help desk people. When we turn this on, we will send someone up in advance and announce to students that they will be available and make sure they get appropriate support to get connected.”
According to Dumire, the feedback from Waynesburg’s main campus has been overwhelmingly positive. There were some bugs and adjustments that were worked through, but the department has used the feedback they received to maximize the experience at the undergraduate campus, as well as the graduate campuses when they are activated.
Dumire feels this new wireless system is valuable compared to the one that was used before where students constantly had to log in and out to be connected and also needed their own personal router in their rooms to have wireless access.
“In the past, students did not have a supported wireless system on campus,” he said. “As we started evaluation, they were getting low bandwidth because of all the different devices installed…There’s a benefit of travelling from room to room and academic building to building and having a reliable, fast connection that works.”
Dumire also made a point to say that ITS is constantly working to improve the student experience with the wireless system, and one thing the department will look to address is potentially finding a way to include gaming systems on the wireless.
Dumire said that there will be a survey sent out in the coming weeks to everyone’s email to gather more feedback about the new Wi-Fi experience so that they can make adjustments and plan ahead for future improvements.
For anyone that has any questions or concerns about the new wireless system, Dumire asks that they reach out to ITS at the Wiley Armory, or contact him directly at wdumire@waynesburg.edu or (724) 852-3382 to address and solve their issues as quickly as possible.