Tufts has plans to bring wireless Internet access to all campus buildings within three years — and Wren Hall is the first priority, according to a University Information Technology (UIT) official.
The target date puts the university on track to fulfill what has long been a perennial student demand, often expressed in campus publications and the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate.
UIT Director of Communications and Organizational Effectiveness Dawn Irish said her office hopes to complete the majority of the Wren outfitting project over Thanksgiving break in order to minimize inconvenience to residents.
Sophomore Chris Mutzel, a Wren resident, praised the decision to service his dorm but said the university needs to act more quickly to implement wireless Internet across campus.
"I think it shows something about what our school values or at least what the administration values," he said. "It's kind of odd that we consider ourselves one of the top universities but we don't have simple things like wireless Internet."
In the past, appeals from the student body for campus-wide wireless have been met with varied success. In 2008, the Senate's Administration and Policy Committee and Tufts Students for the Improvement of Residential Life and Community spearheaded an evaluation of the quality of Tufts' dormitories. After surveying a number of Boston-area schools, they found that Tufts' residential facilities lagged markedly behind those of other schools, particularly in terms of wireless access.
Since then, UIT workers have installed wireless Internet technology in West and Haskell Halls, among other university buildings.
Bringing wireless to Wren requires re-cabling the building and installing Ethernet cords. Officials anticipate a period of several days during this process when the building will have no Internet connection.
The university is working to outfit the campus one building at a time. Limited resources make an immediate, campus-wide Internet de-wiring impossible, according to Irish.
"We are working on the campus as a whole but it has to happen in phases based on the timing of when students are here, based on when we have to remove Internet access to the buildings — and then it's just the sheer workforce required," Irish said. "It's a very large campus and the buildings are old, so they require a lot of re-cabling."
Though actual cost figures for the Wren project were not available at press time, Executive Administrative Dean for the School of Arts and Sciences Leah McIntosh, who has been involved in planning the project, said the dorm's newest technology will be expensive.
"It's pretty pricey because of all the retrofitting that has to be done with all the cabling in the old buildings," McIntosh said. "It's pricier than the average person would think."
"We have been trying to look at places where we've been doing work anyway, and we've been trying to focus on dorms where it would affect a large number of people," McIntosh said.
Last November, the Senate considered allocating a portion of the recovered funds from the embezzlement scandal toward campus-wide wireless. The idea was later dropped when the Senate realized that it could not afford the price tag of installing a university wireless network — which would have cost over $1 million — and maintaining the technology indefinitely.
Wren residents are looking forward to receiving the technology. "I think that it's really exciting," sophomore Charlotte Wright said. "I think that it'll definitely change the whole atmosphere of the dorm. The common rooms will be used a lot more."
