By Grace Wellings

Have you ever been sitting in class and tipped your head back to look at the ceiling? Letting your eyes trail across the speckled drop-ceiling tiles as your professor drones on? Has a white box with a little, blinking blue light ever caught your attention while staring up there? If the answer is “yes,” congratulations, you have seen one of the many WIFI access points on GSU’s campus.

If you have ever had a class in the Administration Building (AB), especially this semester, it is a guarantee that you or someone you know has experienced issues with the WIFI within that building. Like many older buildings on campus, the Administration Building (1872) was not built with WIFI connections in mind. Made of heavy brick, metal caging, and lead paint, AB is an incomplete but surprisingly effective Faraday Cage.

For a little context, a Faraday Cage is essentially an enclosure used to block electromagnetic fields. It operates by disrupting any electrical fields that come in contact with it because the “cage” of a Faraday Cage is already charged with an electrical current. This causes a cancelling effect. An easy way to illustrate this is if a proper, complete Faraday Cage were to be struck by lightning, the person within the cage would remain unharmed because the electrical currents of the cage would cancel out the lightning.

The year 1872, when AB was built, was notorious for its uses of thick brick with metal mesh interwoven throughout a building’s infrastructure to better its integrity. Metal mesh which mimics the action of a Faraday Cage causes the blocking of both cellphone service and WIFI.

Now, access points. Think of them as small at-home routers that sync to one big router. There are several issues with these as is. On the third floor of AB, there are only two access points. Each access point can only hold 25 devices. If there is a class of 15-20 students connected to the same access point, then there is a good chance that well over half of those students are not going to gain access to any sort of WIFI.

This is because students have so much hand-held technology. Each student can easily be carrying a phone, laptop, smartwatch, etc… that connects to whatever access point they are closest to and can take up to three or more places (per student) on that one access point by themselves. Factor in that there are upwards of 15-20 students in classes sometimes, and now there is no room on that access point even if each student brings the bare minimum of technology with them to each class.

So not only are students fighting against a veritable Faraday Cage to even access WIFI, they are also having to compete with each other as to who is going to connect in time to be in those 25 placements first. This is obviously not ideal and the Office of Technology has been working toward alleviating the problems as they arise, but once you factor in both the logistics of the building and the number of students needing to connect to the WIFI it comes down to access points as being the main issue. More access points would mean more WIFI access for students and hopefully with an abundance of them it will help with the Faraday Cage dilemma.

So why not just buy more access points? Easy. The expense to pay for them is too large for the I.T. budget to currently handle, especially at the quantity we would need.

Editor's Note: We will continue updating the work of the Office of Technology and the technology needs on campus throughout the semester.