They had to make sure the directions to the help desk were on a whiteboard because they were afraid the Wi-Fi would go out. Photo by Katerina Anderson.
JOHN DUNN | OPINION COLUMNIST | jcdunn@butler.edu
Life is full of minor inconveniences and petty annoyances that shouldn’t ruin your day but somehow do. A phone at 5% with no charger in sight, a heated steering wheel that takes too long to warm up or autocorrect deciding to turn “omw” into “On my way!” Thanks, Apple.
But among all these trivial frustrations, there’s one first-world problem that cuts much deeper than most — unreliable Wi-Fi.
Picture the scene: you are watching the Butler basketball team play in the NCAA championship. There are 15 seconds left in the game, and Butler is down one but has the ball.
Just as the game-winning three-point attempt is launched, it freezes mid-air. Then the TV goes blurry, and the “buffering wheel” pops up. Did Butler win the National Championship? You may never know, but you do know that Butler lost the contract with its internet provider.
Using Butler’s Wi-Fi feels like rolling dice; 90% of the time it works just fine, but then 10% of the time, a single Google search takes an eternity and you are left refreshing a page for minutes on end. Whether it’s buffering during an online lecture, getting kicked out of a Zoom meeting or waiting for a YouTube video to load, the Wi-Fi can be a source of serious angst.
Nate Loch, a senior computer science and computer engineering double major, provided his thoughts about the good and the bad of Butler’s Wi-Fi.
“I really appreciate them having Ethernet Access in all of the dorms,” Loch said. “It’s very convenient and easy, but [for the wireless Wi-Fi] there is extreme lag, packet loss and delay whenever any traffic outside of the regular traffic is on the network. The first week of classes and finals week, it’s always really bad.”
While Ethernet is a solid backup plan, it only really works for in-dorm computers and doesn’t help on the mobile device front. Also, most Butler students don’t know very much about Ethernet or want to go through the trouble of learning, which leads most students right back to traditional wireless Wi-Fi. So, if that Wi-Fi struggles when too many people are on the network, tragic moments can ensue; imagine how many students are scrambling to use the Wi-Fi at 11:58 p.m. on Sunday night.
Emily Magalski, a sophomore biology and chemistry double major, explained that when the Wi-Fi goes out, she is often forced to just disconnect entirely.
“If I’m trying to do something on my phone and I actually need it to work I definitely have to disconnect from the Wi-Fi and just go off cellular,” Magalski said. “If I want to do something without waiting a while. If I do a lot of Google searches repetitively [with the Wi-Fi connected], it would take forever.”
Junior secondary education major DJ Alfultis explained how Butler’s Wi-Fi affects an increasingly important part of many students’ college experience: online gaming.
“I play a lot of online games, and the Wi-Fi would go in and out, and I’d always joke with my brother [when I was losing], ‘Oh BU Wi-Fi, It’s going in and out,’” Alfultis said. “Eventually I just said, I’m done. I’m tired of inconsistency, so I bought an Ethernet cable.”
It’s not just dorms that suffer from poor Wi-Fi. There are certain spots on campus where Wi-Fi routinely struggles during non-peak hours or just seemingly never works at all. For example, every morning when I walk to class, my music stops loading right in front of Hinkle. Other areas like the Gallahue basement or the space between Atherton and Jordan Hall are notoriously unreliable.
Ellei Coleman, a middle secondary education and math major, described her experience in one of these dead zones.
“I’m part of College Mentors for Kids, and we meet in the academic quad, those benches that are between Jordan and Atherton,” Coleman said. “That area specifically just never gets Wi-Fi. So, I have to turn on my hotspot, or I just have to rely on my phone. It makes using Google Sheets, and [other tools] hard in the moment.”
I do not pretend to be a technology enthusiast or expert, but when I pay tens of thousands of dollars every semester to attend Butler, I expect to have NASA-level Wi-Fi. Why is it that the student population has to randomly suffer through a 3-hour period of 1996 levels of internet connection once every two weeks? Maybe students should be able to trade in their “Out on Town” dollars for access to better Wi-Fi.
Implementing better traffic management, offering an optional premium network for students or increasing the number of connection points on campus are reasonable actions the university can take to improve Wi-Fi consistency. The goal should be that thousands of students can access the university’s online resources, submit assignments and stream lectures without disruptions — even during peak hours.
In a world where everything depends on a stable connection, a university’s Wi-Fi shouldn’t be a gamble — it should be a guarantee.