Hamster WiFi at Dartmouth Strikes Again
Over this past semester, students have noticed a drop in the speed of the wifi connection compared to the summer and the spring. This is partly because of the increased load on the system this semester due to a larger student body on campus but also the large network transition that Dartmouth is currently undergoing.
First, an aside on wifi speeds. Streaming any video in standard definition will require a connection at least a 3 Megabits per second. Any slower than that and your YouTube video will be close to unwatchable in quality and buffer continuously. A social media app requires between 4 or 5Mbps for everything to load. At 5Mbps you can also open the YouTube app and watch videos in native HD, the quality of most current videos. For more video heavy social media sites, a 6Mbps connection will give you a satisfactory experience. These speeds however, do not define how good your final experience with speed will be. Most devices multitask and you might be watching a video while Facebook downloads posts. This means that for a smooth experience, you should be getting closer to 10Mbps speeds, with 25Mbps and above required for 4K streaming.
While you may not be streaming in 4K, the recent wifi speeds have been abysmal. To the right you see the more theoretical speeds that can be achieved at 3:30 AM when most people have gone to sleep. A speed of 76.8 is fantastical, able to support any streaming that may be needed. Unfortunately, this is not representative of the speeds students have been experiencing. To the left we see a speed of 23Mbps, and this is typical of everyday speeds when everything is working correctly. However, these speeds often fall and individuals are faced with speeds like the 2.85Mbps on the right or the even lower 0.68Mbps.
At 2.85Mbps, your YouTube video will become close to unwatchable, buffering continuously and drop to the very pixelated resolution of 480p.
It has been widely noted that wifi speeds this semester have been much slower than during the summer. This is because of two main reasons. The first is simply that the system is overloaded. The fall term is the most busy for Dartmouth and the College hosts the largest number of students of any semester. As more people connect to the network, the wifi slows down as bandwidth decreases and the strain on network hardware causes it to drop connections. Many old routers work by sending data to one device at a time which switching back and forth between users, hopefully fast enough that it is not noticed.
What is the solution to this problem?
The second reason for the slowdown may actually be related to the solution to our slow wifi. Dartmouth’s wifi infrastructure has not been entirely replaced in 10 years. The College has been running patched on top of patched and replace parts only when they break. This changed last year as after a long discussion, faculty and the I.T. Office convinced the College of the necessity to deal with the infrastructure. This past spring of 2019, the College committed $30 Million over three years for the replacement of the network hardware. Over the summer, heat-maps were conducted and the current network was analyzed. While they have started replacing the routers this term — both Tuck and Thayer boast new hardware — this hasn’t been completed elsewhere.
This update has not yet occurred in Baker Library nor the ’53 Commons [FoCo], though plans for both have been approved. The work with replacements and updates to the software will no doubt improve student experience, but is also takes time and attention away from patching the current system. As this transition is occurring, it is likely that there is less time for staff to focus on maintaining the speeds on the current network. Furthermore, the new routers run newer software which is not always fully compatible with the older infrastructure, leading to further slowdowns.
The current changes to Dartmouth’s infrastructure are a long overdue measure as the internet becomes more and more involved in our lives. With students using the web to conduct research and aid in studying, we will be seeing ever more student presence online. It seems however, that the current state of slow affairs is only transitory and will soon end with much better speeds. Hopefully in the coming semesters low speeds will become an exception rather than the rule.
