After a long day of taking notes, reading textbooks and chasing elementary school children at my tutoring job, the only thing that I want to do when I get back to my room is curl up on my bed and watch some good old Hulu. Once I’m finally settled in my bed wearing my comfiest pajamas, I open my laptop and start to watch last night’s episode of “30 Rock.”
After a laugh here and a chuckle there, the video freezes. Crap. I look down at the floor and see that my Ethernet cord has fallen out of the computer, and worst of all, it’s somehow landed five feet away from my bed. Now I must decide if finishing my show is worth getting out from under the covers and exerting what seems like a lifetime of energy. My body says no, but I finally convince myself to pick it up. After all, I have done it 189 times before.
Boston University’s Wi-Fi is, in two words, unreliable and sporadic. Last year, when I was a freshman, I never had wireless Internet in the dorm rooms. It wasn’t even a possibility. The only way I was able to get Internet without an annoying cord connecting me to a wall was if I were able to find a seat in a crammed study lounge, otherwise I would have to go the George Sherman Union or library.
Over the summer I received one of the best emails from BU. It claimed that upon the start of the new school year, BU would be wireless in most of the larger dorms. I was elated. All I could think about was how happy I would be when I could lay on my bed and watch whatever I wanted to without having to rely on a cord that hated me with a passion. I was ready to roam the vast hills of the Internet.
The problem is, I have yet to find a place in my room where the Wi-Fi works, and so have many other students who live in West, East and South Campus. We were promised wi-fi and we are disappointed to see that BU hasn’t pulled through. After a semester of attempting to connect to the Internet every day, I have only successfully found a connection five times, and each of those times, it has run obnoxiously slow.
While at college, students don’t have much space of their own that they can control. They just have their rooms. And it’s a little frustrating that in this century, a time where technology has advanced astoundingly fast, a topnotch university like BU can’t provide reliable Wi-Fi in all of the student dorms, a place where students go home to relax and distress from their classes. I think it’s about time that BU takes a look into the matter and tries to provide Wi-Fi for all of the students who need it to not only unwind, but to study for their classes.
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