Imagine going into a store and buying a bag of your favorite brand of potato chips. The bag looks like its bursting at the seams with chips.Hungrily, you tear open the bag to find about half a measly cup worth of crumbs that barely takes up one fifth of the space in the bag.
Do you feel that sinking realization of being ripped off? If you live in a residence hall on campus, it probably reminds you of the feeling you get every time you try to log on to the Internet.
When I was deciding which university I wanted to go to, one of the biggest factors was money. How much was tuition? How expensive were the meal plans? How much would my dorm room cost?
I chose Tech because when I compared prices, it looked like here I would get the most for my money. For the most, part I was right.
However, I never anticipated how awful the Internet connection would be. Over the past three years, my Internet connection has gone from a little slow to absolutely crawling.
Over spring break, I used a computer with a dial-up connection, and I felt like it was moving at the speed of light.
Of course, it’s hard for me to accurately gage how slow the Internet here is because the connection works so rarely.
Very often I’m re-searching online, and the connection is lost. I know I’m not the only person on campus who has been in the middle of a timed ilearn test when the Internet connection disappeared.
I have had to run to the library and frantically log back on to timed tests. If I’m very lucky, the library lab computer will work fast enough to let me finish the test. But that’s a slim chance. Other times, my connection in the dorm will disappear after the library is closed. That means an ‘F’ for an online assignment.
On the Monday after spring break, I decided to keep a log of what my internet connection did throughout the day. At 9 a.m. when I went to check my e-mail, I got the “server not found” message. After thirty minutes, I was able to get to the ResNet login page, only to see “the connection has timed out.” I gave up for a few hours.
At 2 p.m., I went as far as the iLearn homepage before the “server not found” message appeared again. I had no connection for almost an hour. For the next hour, the connection kept timing out.
I finally had to run down to the library, muttering some choice four-letter-words as I walked through the rain. The same thing happened again later in the evening.
College is unbelievably expensive. One of the many things I’m paying for is Internet in my dorm room.
After careful consideration, I think I have found a solution to this problem. If I only have a connection a fraction of the time I’ve been promised, how about I only pay a fraction of the fee I’ve been charged?
