In the Halloween edition of The Universe, Peter Call had a column expressing how he was upset about Google Fiber not being installed at BYU, and I’d just like to clarify some technical misconceptions that Peter may have. First of all, we have not been “slapped in the face” by Google, BYU has its own connection directly to the backbone of the internet. We have no ISP “middle man”, and in fact as a University we have an excellent, high speed connection. Any slowness that you have experienced is either a problem with your device or a congested wireless router; if you used an Ethernet cable your connection would be fine, but who wants to do that? And in fact we get a better deal than we would if we had Google Fiber, as we get comparable speeds but also get free cable through the campus’s IPTV service. Second, I would be highly surprised if there was not already fiber in use on campus between buildings.
Third, any slowness you may have experienced with Learning Suite, or any other campus online resource like MyMap, is that the servers that run the services get overloaded when everyone tries to connect at 12:01 a.m. to register, not because of a slow connection. Videos not loading in class are once again probably due to poor wireless router placement, it can be very hard to properly locate a router because of a buildings layout or how many people will be connecting to it. If there is a location where there are perennial WiFi issues contact your friendly IT department, as it’s hard to fix a problem when you don’t know about it.
Jayden Milne
Lakeville, Minnesota
