Dorms look to improve campus internet connection

Since students began living on-campus at UWG, it is obvious that the internet connection in the dorm rooms are slowing down.

With all the new technology enhancements going on around UWG, it seems that the internet speed has suffered, especially in on-campus housing.

As Interim Director of Student Services, Blake Adams is in charge of the direction of most forward services such as the computer labs and classrooms.

“The dorms have a bandwidth of about 36 megabits. The average household has a bandwidth of three megabits,” said Adams.

According to Adams’s information, the average on-campus resident has much more bandwidth than the average household, but why is the connection slower?

In simpler terms, Adams explained that the internet is connected through a pipeline and because that pipeline is being used by so many people, it is slowing down the flow of the internet connection.

Fortunately for students, Information Technology Services and Residence Life are working together to help solve this problem.

“We are working to fund an expansion of the bandwidth we are now using in student housing, that way students can browse the web more freely,” sad Chief Information Officer Kathy Kral.

With the amount of time students devote on the internet, an upgrade like this is clearly one in which UWG needs too invest.

Kral also noted that they were planning on upgrading the myUWG e-mail portal over the fall break. With the current portal, students have a limited amount of e-mails that they can hold in their myUWG account.

“This upgrade will allow students to hold much more e-mails than they could previously,” said Kral.

With approximately 183 billion e-mails sent daily worldwide, e-mail is a massive market and will only grow as more of the world gains access to the internet. Knowing this piece of information toward this improvement is one to be valued across campus.

There are plenty of ways that computer owners can speed up their own computers and laptops. As an individual user, taking a look at where downloads are coming from can help. Downloading music and movies from illegitimate web sites, and using applications that constantly check the internet such as online gaming can significantly slow down a computer. Deleting programs that are no longer useful and updating anti-virus software are minor changes that can increase speed.