October 26, 2011

I have a bone to pick with the University of Winnipeg.

Before I go any further let me preface: I like my university. I love the downtown campus. I appreciate the availability of coffee, the various types of spaces available to study and socialize, and the overall positive vibe I get while lugging my stuff from classroom to classroom. It's great that we have the new science building and the dorms (though I don't use them) and although apparently it's going to cost me an additional sixty dollars a year in tuition, it's cool that they're going to be building a new state-of-the-art wellness complex. I get that.

So why the Hell is it that with all this expansion and renovations happening on campus, all my tuition being funneled into these new projects I can't connect to the goddamn wifi?!

At first I thought it was just me. I being my iPad to campus and that's generally how I (try to) connect to the wifi. Last year it was choppy and dropped frequently at the best of times, but this year it has become unbearable. Unless I'm on campus after 7pm there is no signal. And that's between the UW Students wifi (which I have a password for), and the UW Visitors and the UW Conference, which are apparently unsecured networks but I can't seem to connect to.

What I usually wind up doing (and am currently doing) is connecting to a Personal Hotspot from my iPhone, which is ridiculous considering that tethering takes away from my data plan while there's a wifi signal all around me that is so weak that I can't even connect to it.

Ever single student I have asked about this issue either has zero connectivity on campus, or has a signal that is so weak that they can barely use the Internet while on campus. Let me repeat: Every. Single. Student. And as someone who has a full course load and has engaged with most of the students in all of my classes on this issue, that's a lot of frustrated students.

So why hasn't this been remedied?

I mean, the tuition that we students pay every year is one of the lifelines that keeps the university going. We students are the reason (in theory) that this institution exists in the first place. And yet we can't get a simple service like reliable wifi? It's a joke.

Last week the University of Winnipeg Student's Association had the student body vote to pay an extra 60$ annually to go towards the new Bill Wedlake Fitness Centre, which we happily obliged. How much would it cost annually, per student, to provide a better wifi signal? It baffles me that something like wifi that every student uses every day largely ignored, while we're asked to shell out for a new fitness centre that maybe half of the student body will even use while they attend this institution.

Of course, Lloyd Axworthy can't brag about the reliability of his wifi connection to possible investors. He needs physical things like a new science building and a new fitness centre to draw investment attention to the university. Running a university is a business, after all, and as long as the employees -or in this, case, students- sit by and let their needs be ignored, nothing will change.

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