I was proud to know that IIIT was the only academic institute in India to have wifi campus when I joined IIIT. Back then wifi offered good connectivity and bandwidth on Intranet and it was a feel good that you don’t have to look for wires to go online. Sit anywhere with your laptop and you are ready to go online.
As time passed, the no. of students using wifi increased due to huge intake of students in different branches. The wifi infrastructure which provided a speed of 20MBps per user at some point of time is now like a 56kbps modem line which you won’t prefer if you are not out of options. Apart from the decreased bandwidth per user, other problems arose in course of time like the switches grew older, UPSs lost their efficiency etc.
The funniest part of wifi infrastructure currently are these UPSs. They are attached to each and every switch in hostels. Whenever power goes down, the UPS also goes down and start screaming as if they are designed to kill everyone in the vicinity. The backup they provide is hardly a minute or so (not more than two minutes surely). These UPSs are so intelligent that whenever power comes, they can’t sense it and they need to be restarted. I would like to congratulate the designer to make such high class UPSs to make our life miserable. So, we have UPSs that goes down immediately on power cut and needs to be restarted when power is back. The only advantage of having these UPSs is that our life is miserable.
Another fun part is NBH(New Boys Hostel, one of the hostels at IIIT campus) switch. This 3Com switch is too old to sustain the peak data transfers. This switch goes down every 3-4 hours and needs to be restarted manually using a hard reboot ( hard reboot means cutting the power supply and then restoring it.). This switch is kept in a locked room and whenever one has to restart it, he has to look around for the key in cellar.
I am afraid that due to the continuously increasing load, some day entire wifi will collapse and we will have serious wireless crisis at IIIT. Students Lab Committee is trying hard to convince people around to come up with alternate solutions. I hope we will have some solutions soon.
PS : No PSs this time 🙂
wireless sucks a big time……… but still i’ve hard time imagining how come i get speeds close to 3-4 MBps on dc sometimes…… but browsing experience is a kind of nightmare…… i can’t even imagine people who really browse… coz my browsing is nothing compared to my peers 😀 …. and congrats that you’ve maintained your posting streak for a straight one week 😛
yawn !
yeah wireless sux man,
it was some months ago when i played the whole Serious Sam in co-op mode with a friend, (multiplayer games basically needs very low latency) it was absolutely fine then. Now its not possible at all!
wireless works well in OBH 3rd floor .. atleast no prob wid me.. but nowadays the speed has surely decreased..not much although..
each wireless access point has 54Mbps shared speed, but what is speed of internet that IIT have procured from ISP, and for sure IIT must be having multiple access points to cover big areas.
1) Internet bandwdith is still costing very high in india.
2) UPS contains battries, which required maintaince, and have defined life, normally after 2-3 years battries are to be replaced, depending upon charging cycles
3) Higher speed access points are avaiable in market, but changing infrastrucre will be adding cost over head.
4) Switches has lmited mac address table, when this table gets filledup, switches does gives problem, and each switch also has pps(packet per second) processing powers, old models have very low processing, again infrastrucre is required.
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