Students still without Wi-Fi, but paying for service

Students are still waiting for Wi-Fi in residences and Prince Hall, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t paying for it anyway.
The installation, which was supposed to begin in May, is unlikely to finish before the winter semester.
There’s still a lot of work to do before the King’s Wi-Fi network is put in place, facilities director Alex Doyle says. Before they can begin installation, King’s still has to send out a complete layout of the school—including building locations and floor layout plans—to Internet providers.
Doyle says these steps have been put on hold as the school waits on approval from the province for the $100 technology fee for the Wi-Fi—a fee already applied to full-time students’ account after it was approved by the Board of Governors at their meeting in June.
That means students are already paying for Wi-Fi they don’t have, says King’s Students’ Union (KSU) financial vice-president Alex Bryant.
“The project is a ‘priority’ that keeps being ‘delayed’,” KSU president Anna Dubinski says.
Doyle says the school is working on a temporary fix. The school is setting up a Wi-Fi lounge in North Pole Bay, using the school’s existing Internet hardware.
Doyle also plans to talk to Dalhousie about temporarily extending the Dal-WPA2 system to King’s residences. That network currently only serves academic buildings – the New Academic Building (NAB), the Arts and Administration Building and the library. Fleeting access to the network in Prince Hall is all down to luck.
In the meantime, the KSU will be asking students where they want the Wi-Fi hooked up first.