Oh the joys of college life, parties (which means loads of drinks and headaches in the mornings), ladies, I could go on and on, but all is not well in the land of milk and honey that is college. For one the football is not nearly as good as originally thought, albeit not terrible, and secondly the Internet on campus is about as reliable as running Microsoft Vista (or if I was really evil worse that Windows ME). How could this be you ask? Well lets take a look at some of the problems the Internet has (and I am not the only one with these problems):

1. The Internet drops connection regularly. Last night I had the Internet drop the connection for no reason 3 times in ten minutes. I would have it for 30 seconds and then bam gone for 2 minutes. This wasn’t the first time either, I would hazard a guess that of the time I was online in the last week the internet has dropped over ten times, ranging from under a minute to close to 2 hours in length.
2. The authorization system is simply annoying. The school has 2 Internet connections: TU secure and TUwebonly. Secure is WPA protected and webonly simply has a lan auth connection. Well IT says you should only have to sign in to the network once a day on the wireless network and once a week on the wired network. Funny, I have to sign back in every 2-3 interrupting must of the time I send online.
3. Internet speed hasn’t really improved since the beginning of the year. At the beginning of the year the Internet was terrible, barely dial up at peak times, which forced a campus wide forum and potential caps to people who go over 3GB a day. Well after 3 months on campus the Internet speed may have increased but it is hardly noticeable in the scope of things. I still can’t watch youtube videos with out them stopping and starting, and most downloads range 40-50 KB/s, although I did manage 300 KB/s at three in the morning.

It really seems like all the people in IT are running around with their head between their asses not sure what anyone else is doing. Their explanation for my troubles last night was because it was a planned outage to fix the problems. That fine and all but when I go check on the campus notice board (where I am told this outage is announced) I see this:

There will be an Internet outage November 8th from midnight to approximately 2am for AT&T fiber routing.

Too bad my problems occurred at 10PM November 8th. That outage noted in the message never occurred, I was on the Internet from 12-2 and had no problems (although I did have a half hour drop at 10 on Wednesday night). So maybe my problem was that I came to college with wrong expectations, put it would seem that if I pay 30K a semester to attend the services would work when you need them.

UPDATE: I again had drops today 5 in a 30 minute period, so the problem is still happening so much for fixing it.

[tags]University of Tulsa, internet, problems, unresolved, college, parties[/tags]