Useless WiFi angers Copenhagen students

»This room is for group work,« says Communication and IT Student Jonas Lomholdt, »And the net never works in here.«

We are on the second floor of Building 24, in the middle of the building and close to everything. Except, it seems, an internet router. Jonas Lomholdt contacted our Danish-language sister Uniavisen.dk on Facebook, asking them to write an article on how »useless the WiFi is at KUA [The Department of Humanities, ed.]«. His post prompted a series of comments in agreement:

»There is no connection between 08:00 and 16:00,« writes Anna. And Asbjørn adds: »It’s also a massive bother for our lecturers, who can’t stream clips from the net. We waste so much time waiting for YouTube clips to load.«

Student: Money down the drain

We tested it, armed with a laptop and a smartphone for good measure. Both are set up to connect to Eduroam, but neither can access it, or the guest network.

»The funny thing is that we are taught Audio/Visual Communication here. Our focus is entirely digital. We had a practical lesson the other day where didn’t do anything. We were supposed to analyse websites, but our lecturer couldn’t show us the sites, and we couldn’t log on to them,« he says.

»It’s money down the drain for the University of Copenhagen,« he says, and adds that the general lack of space at KUA makes it difficult to up and move the class.

No comment from Department

But maybe there is hope yet. In the future there will be WiFi across the Faculty, writes Faculty Director Kristian Boye Petersen to Uniavisen.dk. And the soon-to-be-ready KUA 2 will have building-wide WiFi coverage from the get go.

»The network issues at KUA 1 are there because we didn’t predict that wireless internet access would be necessary everywhere at the time of building. We have had to set it up afterwards,« he writes.

The Faculty also has a number of transportable WiFi-spots (so-called Access Points) that lecturers can borrow from the AV-department, writes Kristian Boye Petersen. He adds that the IT-department has started setting WiFi up for the departments that need it the most at KUA 1. Jonas Lomholdt’s Head of Department, Maja Horst, did not wish to discuss the matter with Uniavisen, so we cannot say why Jonas’ lecturers aren’t using Access Points, or whether or not the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication are aware that their students cannot access the internet.

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