For a brief time on Wednesday afternoon, Ohio University’s Wi-Fi completely shut down.
In an email sent out to all students, Ohio University’s IT department explained the outage occurred due to an issue with the Wi-Fi’s firewalls.
“The outage happened when our Internet firewalls stopped passing traffic,” the email said. “Those devices detected the problem automatically and rebooted themselves. Once the reboot was complete, internet access returned to normal.”
Wi-Fi mishaps are not uncommon to students at OU. Alan Boone, a freshman studying business, said the Wi-Fi at OU is often unreliable.
“Whenever you have a lot of people trying to do the same thing at once in one room it always crashes,” Boone said.
The campus-wide Wi-Fi system may not always be the most reliable, but it is certainly expensive. Sean O’Malley, IT communications manager, said OU spends several hundred thousand dollars on Wi-Fi a year.
“We currently pay around $250,000 per year for the university’s internet bandwidth, or about fifty cents per student per month,” O’Malley said in an email.
According to O’Malley, the bandwidth is purchased from a third party called OARnet that provides service to various universities around Ohio.
"We pay OARnet for about a year of service at a time, but our contract is essentially month to month.”
O’Malley noted the cost of the internet bandwidth is gradually decreasing, but the increasing need for Wi-Fi keeps the price up.
“The rate we pay for bandwidth typically goes down about 10% each year, but that savings is offset by rising demand,” he said. “For example, we currently are purchasing about two and a half times more bandwidth than we were a year ago to meet student demand.”
O’Malley said although the University pays around 50 cents per student for Wi-Fi every month, there is no direct fee that students have to pay for the Wi-Fi.
Tanner Marmie, a freshman studying business, said considering the cost of the Wi-Fi, it should be more reliable.
"For paying 250,000, when the Wi-Fi doesn’t always work, it’s kind of a waste," Marmie said. "I know there’s a lot of kids here, but still, the wifi just goes in and out all of the time, it’s not even worth it."
