Many students took to venting their Wi-Fi related frustrations over the last few days on the Wolfpack Students Facebook group after they had experienced less-than-ideal wireless internet coverage on campus.

Students reported that the Wi-Fi had been unusually slow compared to speeds in previous years, and in some cases it wasn’t working at all.

Stan Martin, the Office of Information Technologies’ director of outreach, communications and consulting, said that engineers working for OIT had identified some issues within the newly installed ResNet system that was put in half the dorms over the summer.

“There’s a major transition that took place over the summer,” Martin said. “We’ve installed a new environment in half of the residence halls. We’re in the process of putting wireless access points in all the rooms. Most of the complaints have come from people in the new [ResNet] environment.”

ResNet is part of a recent university initiative to install wireless access points in all dorm rooms on campus. The first phase of installations was completed over the summer while students were away. Martin said that the large increase in daily users put the system under more strain, leading to some of the issues that students reported.

Paul Nolan, the student body president and a senior studying materials science and engineering, said that he empathized with students struggling with the campus Wi-Fi and hoped that they would remain patient while the problems are addressed.

“Sometimes people expect me to have a magic wand that I can wave and make problems like this go away, but the truth is that all I can do in a situation like this is make sure the right people are on the case,” Nolan said. “Our lives depend on Wi-Fi. I appreciate everyone being patient with this.”

According to Martin, engineers from OIT worked to clean up the new systems in response to the complaints that people expressed. Martin said he believes that many of the issues people faced with campus Wi-Fi have been addressed, and that still more changes can be expected as of Wednesday.

“We waited through Labor Day weekend to put the changes into place because there was no one at the OIT office to call if something went wrong,” Martin said.

If problems continue after the system fixes have been put in place, Martin asked that students submit official help tickets so that OIT knows when problems are occurring on campus. Martin said that while the engineers at OIT had done excellent work in addressing the issues within ResNet, their work was difficult because they were largely working from anecdotal evidence submitted to Wolfpack Students.

*The Office of Information Technology would like students to know help tickets can be submitted at help@ncsu.edu