Waynesburg University is still in the process of trying to install campus-wide Wi-Fi, which is expected to be completed by the beginning of the Fall 2017 semester.

However, the process has been multi-faceted and extensive, and for a few days, students living in Willison Hall were asked to turn off their personal wireless internet devices while the testing was going on in that residence hall.

“A number of students turned off the devices, and so, we were able to capture a lot of information to allow us to know what we need to do when we completely roll out wireless campus-wide,” said Bill Dumire, vice president for Information Technology Services and chief information officer.

Dumire said that although there has been some negative feedback from students in Willison, he still feels shutting down the devices was necessary.

“I think some students were somewhat frustrated because as they connected, [the Wi-Fi] wasn’t as fast as what they thought it might be, and that directly relates back to the fact that there was a number of personal access points that were still turned on that caused a lot of interference,” said Dumire.

“So our hunch that we needed to have those devices turned off was true, and we now know going forward what we need to make sure that we inform students of before they come back for the fall semester.”

Help Desk Coordinator Kylee Sargent also feels that the decision will work out as a positive.

“The results of those two days were extremely important,” said Sargent.

“I’m not sure if students really understand how much the interference affects their quality. So when we did turn those off, we immediately were seeing much better speeds. So I think just helping students understand that turning those off really was important we absolutely had to do that to test the system to make sure that it was doing what we thought it was doing, and I think that went well.”

Testing is now over, and Willison residents were told that they could turn on their personal hotspots and wireless access points until the end of the spring semester. Dumire said that he has received a couple of emails from students that were concerned about not being able to get reconnected before the end of the semester and that he gave those students clarification about the situation.  Dumire said that the help desk has also heard from students who said that the performance of the Wi-Fi was not what they expected.

“We’ve attempted to remind students that that’s the whole reason that we did a pilot,” said Dumire. “ So that way, when the testing is complete, we can roll out a product that does work and does meet expectations of both the university and the students. ”

Dumire said that he did not expect all of the feedback to be positive, and that was why the testing was necessary.

“So that we could identify any issues or bumps in the road and we could fully address that.” Dumire said. “I do think that the feedback we got, both positive and negative, will ensure that before [the Fall semester], the network is deployed in such a way that students will have the ability to come back and easily connect their devices. That the speed will be where it is expected, and overall, the appropriate security is in place to protect them and what it is that they’re doing or searching or looking for on their devices as they use those throughout the campus.”

Overall, Dumire says that testing went as expected from a technical standpoint.

“[Testing] helped us identify a few issues that we needed to address before we rolled [the Wi-Fi]out campus-wide,”said Dumire.

“It verified and validated some information that we thought we had related to how the system was going to work. It gave us an opportunity to see if we were going to have major issues getting devices connected to the wireless network, which in most cases we did not.