Security-related hang-ups can be frustrating to students used to walking into a Starbucks coffee shop and getting immediate access to the internet. They want to know why it’s so much harder to get a campus connection.
“The answer is that Starbucks isn’t giving you access to its servers,” Jackson said.
Student expectations also shape the way schools think when refurbishing or building new classrooms and residence halls.
St. Louis University is in the midst of a multi-year plan to upgrade all of its classrooms by summer of 2013. Each room will be guaranteed to have enough wireless access points to let every student access the internet.
Also included is enough electrical outlets to keep all those devices charged up. In some ways, that’s the more difficult challenge, said Tim Brooks, the school’s chief information officer.
“It’s not access to wireless,” Brooks said. “It’s access to power.”
That’s something Mizzou also has been dealing with in recent years as it builds and renovates the residence halls where nearly 6,000 students live. Most of the older halls were built at a time when students came to campus with a desk lamp, radio and hair dryer.
It’s not uncommon for students to show up today with 20 or more devices, said Frankie Minor, director of residential life.
Rooms with a half dozen plug-ins have been replaced by rooms with up to 20 plug-ins.
And they have cable lines, Ethernet lines and land lines for phones, even though the vast majority of students have no use for them. (The logic is that it’s much cheaper to add the lines during renovation or construction — just in case they might be needed again someday.)
What Mizzou hasn’t yet addressed — and it’s a significant issue in the eyes of students who want the comforts of home — is a way to get wireless internet into rooms. It’s available only in common areas such as lounges and laundry rooms.
The school last tried a wireless pilot program in 2002. It worked great with an empty building but rapidly degenerated once it was full of students and their gear.
Nearly a decade later, they are ready to try again. Sometime in the next couple of months, they’ll shut off the wired connections in one of the halls and see whether a new wireless network can handle the load.
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