More students and faculty members than ever are using UBC’s WiFi network, creating new challenges for the school’s IT team.
This year, the network passed an all-time record of 82,000 concurrent users, who are also accessing it on different devices that demand more and more of its bandwidth.
“One of the bigger challenges … are what people are doing on the wireless network these days,” said Eric Bourdon, manager of the Network and Infrastructure Facilities with UBC Information Technology.
Bourdon said that many of the students who live in buildings are using gaming consoles which create another big challenge for the IT department.
The IT network has also been experiencing a few unexpected connectivity issues in the months since classes have started. On September 17, a power bump caused wireless connectivity issues in some of the university buildings, including the Walter Gage Towers and the Dorothy Somerset building.
The IT department has 24/7 surveillance of the network so when connectivity issues do occur, the department can normally quickly resolve the outage.
But even a short outage can be potentially disastrous at the wrong time, such as during exams.
“A good analogy is you're in a classroom writing on a piece of paper and you drop your pencil you pick it up and keep on writing if you’re an exam and writing it on wireless, and it goes out for 30 seconds it has a much bigger impact,” Bourdon said.
UBC student Austin Tonack said that he has been experiencing issues connecting to the WiFi every day.
“It’s preventing me from doing a lot of work, cause I do a lot of work online,” said Tonack, noting many of his assignments are hosted on online homework systems. “... I have to go home or somewhere else to do it or use my phone as a hotspot.”
Other students in the r/UBC subreddit have cited similar problems with the wifi as well. Many people agree that the wifi was good up until the May upgrade.
Bourdain said that change was to make sure UBC’s WiFi met new national security standards, but acknowledged its potential impact.
“It was actually a pretty significant change, and we recognize the potential impact on people, so we did a very large campaign around that to ... get as much information out as we could and to really help user as much a possible,” he said.