By Matt Kyle | Staff Writer
AirBear WPA2 is infamous among students as the Wi-Fi connection that only works about half the time, if you’re lucky. I have counted off my fingers the number of times my connection has quit on me while I’m at Moody Memorial Library working on an assignment or rushing to get something printed before class.
To make matters worse, Baylor’s Wi-Fi wasn’t always this bad. My freshman year, when I relied heavily on campus Wi-Fi because I lived on campus, I almost never had problems with my connection. Sure, it wasn’t the best, but at least I wasn’t buffering every three minutes. Now, I can’t even work at Moody because it’s a guarantee that I will lose connection at least five times while I’m there.
Baylor has so many great places on campus to study, but I never end up studying there because I can’t connect to Canvas. I try to do a lot of work from the Lariat newsroom, but of course, the connection there isn’t great either. So, instead of enjoying the beautiful Baylor campus, I’m stuck in my apartment, which also isn’t a great place to study because there’s no limit to the distractions that could keep me from getting my work done.
Considering that we pay around $60,000 a year to go to Baylor, you would think the Wi-Fi would be a little better. You would think Baylor would at least make sure its students have a stable Wi-Fi connection to get work done, especially considering how prevalent online classes have been for the past year and a half because of COVID-19. Good Wi-Fi is a necessity in college, and Baylor can’t even give that to us.
I mean seriously, where is our tuition money going? Baylor can afford to build a new welcome center and a new basketball arena, in addition to renovating Tidwell Bible Building and Collins Residence Hall, but it can’t afford to upgrade our servers? It doesn’t seem like it would even be that hard of a job compared to the yearslong construction of the welcome center and arena. I’m no tech wizard, but can’t Baylor just call one in to get us some better Wi-Fi?
With the increase in the number of students on campus this year, the number of connected devices goes up, and each device takes up more bandwidth. Baylor knew the freshman class was going to be huge, and it could have planned ahead, but considering the university is putting the overflow freshmen in a hotel, it’s pretty clear planning ahead is not Baylor’s strong suit. The least it can do now is listen to student complaints and give us better Wi-Fi. We deserve better.
