Ahh, the internet. It giveth and it taketh away, but for most of us, it’s been a near-constant part of our lives since we could first put finger-to-touchscreen. And without it? The first month of this semester has been a near constant battle to connect to our coursework, friends, and the wider world. It’s been pretty rough, for me, for our Opinion Editor Sam Heilmann, ’26 (who wrote about this a couple weeks ago and to your right), and, I’m sure, for you.
Yet in the midst of the ceaseless loading screens, I see positive signs for our Allegheny community and the way we respond as an institution to moments of duress.
For all my internet issues, I’ve been rather impressed with the communication and on-the-spot support from our Information Technology team. In emails to the campus community and interviews with The Campus, they’ve been specific and transparent about the work they’re doing and the infrastructure that needs to be fixed.
On Friday, Sept. 1, for example, IT emailed the campus and informed us of a planned outage from 2 a.m. to 11 a.m. the following day. The email explained that each building had to be disconnected and brought back online one by one to deal with a data loop — and linked to a Google Doc with a longer explanation.
I remember getting that email, reading the explanation for a data loop, and it made sense what the issue was and how they were trying to fix it. The email did not solve my Wi-Fi issues, but it helped make me feel like my experience as a student mattered and that someone was still working on the network.
There’s also the activation of my room’s wired ethernet connection. I thought it would take a while to kick in. After all, IT’s got their hands full, and activating my connection, while assumedly not difficult, seems a mid-to-low priority. I set up a time to go with a friend to buy a cable from Walmart later that day, and thought nothing of it.
Not only did IT turn on the connection, they offered me a loaner cable to go with it well before I even went to Walmart. They didn’t snap their fingers and fix everything, but they did show attention and care to my request. It’s not a lot, but it again makes it feel like IT is paying attention and giving a crap.
And when it comes to it, the college has not shied away from acknowledging how bad our internet is. In stories published by The Campus, IT has been pretty clear in identifying and decrying the quality of our current network infrastructure, built by Wi-Fiber. They’ve made it clear that solving a lot of these problems requires rebuilding that infrastructure to be stronger.
Speaking of Wi-Fiber, The Campus reported last week on the decision to switch over to the company. While there weren’t a whole lot of super concrete answers — the administrator who signed off on the company has since left, and a number of parties declined to comment — both Allegheny as a college and their individual employees acknowledged it was not a good move. Nobody stubbornly stood by Wi-Fiber, or said we should all suck it up and deal with it.
Instead, they acknowledged the issues at hand and the source of the problem. President Ron Cole, ’87, straight up called the internet situation a “failure” in an email to us all. That’s honesty. That’s communication. I’m not sure the Allegheny of my freshman year would have stepped up and said that, and that’s important in my eyes.
I’ll let you in on a little secret: The internet will never be fully fixed, metaphorically speaking. Institutions, communities, relationships — they’re always going to hit snags and troubles. Things will almost never run 100% as they should. What is the mark of a good institution, therefore, is often less about the exactness of its operations, and more the way it communicates and commiserates with its constituents’ problems.
Which brings us back to the internet connection here. It still sucks. It’s still a problem, and it’s going to piss me off until new core switches — which I know about from an IT email — are installed. The college, in my eyes, owes us a better internet connection as part of our residential and academic experience. I’m just glad the fight is with the Wi-Fi, and not with our staff.
So thank you, IT. You’re doing the best you can, and I, for one, appreciate that.