Wireless Woes Irk Students

The start of the new school year has added increased activity to Harvard’s wireless network, slowing down or interrupting Internet connections for most students in river Houses.

Larry Levine, the chief information officer for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), said that the root cause of the problem was overuse.

“At the beginning of each school year, the wireless use increases over the previous year,” he said, as more students use laptops and transfer increasingly large files over the network.

Levine also said that the growing popularity of iTunes, which automatically connects to the network, and file sharing software like Limewire and Ares/Warez has put even more strain on the network this year. He recommended that students who are transferring large files use the ethernet jacks available in dorm rooms.

“When wireless was first started here, it was never seen as a replacement for a wired connection,” Levine said. He added that although he knew students “don’t like to be tethered” to their computers, “wired is always going to be more robust and probably faster.”

Erin C. Nettifee, the supervisor of residential computing for FAS, said that it was unclear why the river Houses in particular were experiencing slower wireless connectivity.

“The service is intermittent. Some residents are seeing great service, others not so much,” she said. Nettifee added that students should expect to see improvements beginning in early October, as the necessary bandwidth additions are made to the network.

Akash Goel ’07 said that the wireless connection was down in his entire Kirkland House entryway. Jennifer Yan ’09, who lives in Leverett House, also said that she has been unable to load any websites using wireless.

“I finally just turned off my wireless because I knew it wasn’t working,” she said.

According to the Harvard Computer Services website, students who need to connect more than one computer to a jack can pickup mini-hubs at the Student Help Desk located in the basement of the Science Center. The hubs are free for the school year.

But according to Goel, residents of Kirkland would rather take a hike downstairs than plug in at their desks.

“The computer lab (which is usually empty) in the Kirkland basement is packed right now,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Goel said he hopes a backup to the FAS network will arrive soon.

“I heard that the city of Cambridge is getting WiFi soon, so when Harvard’s network is having problems, hopefully we’ll be able to get on Cambridge’s,” he said.

—Staff writer Jillian M. Bunting can be reached at jbunting@fas.harvard.edu.