Guest Wifi now on campus

Imagine being a guest at Portland State.

Whether you’re here to do personal research at Millar Library or attend an academic conference, accessing the Internet will be a necessary part of business.

Shouldn’t this process be quick and easy? Now it is.

Before August, guest users needing to gain access to the PSU network had to make contact with the help desk, most likely wait in a long line and create a temporary account—a process anything but immediate.

Keen to this inefficiency, the network and telecommunications team, led by Director Shane Perry, has recently developed a new guest WiFi infrastructure that requires no assistance from the help desk.

Tamarack Birch-Wheeles, a network analyst in the network and telecommunications department, said the earlier process was especially inconvenient for big parties and conferences.

“Now the workload overall is distributed, as everybody can enter in their own contact information without visiting the help desk,” Birch-Wheeles said. Most importantly, this new guest wireless infrastructure alleviates pressure on employees at the Office of Information Technology, he added.

With a more easily accessible network for guest users, students may be asking themselves a major question: Will this lead to an oversaturation of guests users on the PSU network, making my time on the Internet slower?

The case is almost the opposite. While there could happen to be more guest users on the network, the student and guest capacities are now differentiated. The old system was set up so that any guest requesting a temporary account would have the same experience as a student using the wireless infrastructure, Perry explained.

“We did not limit bandwidth usage or prevent/block bit torrents, for example. Guest users are now limited and throttled with the capacities they can utilize,” Perry said.

One could easily presume that a major transition like this would be costly and require massive funding. Think again.

“The entire project was only a labor investment. There was no capitol involved,” Perry said. The networking team tries to focus on implementing open source projects, which are free of charge and only require work hours. There was no new hardware purchased.

The guest wireless is geared toward the guest user’s basic needs of checking email and browsing, therefore allowing significantly more control over campus Internet capacities for non-PSU students, faculty or staff. This means that for students, staff and faculty, the Internet experience should be better all around.

“We did not want to compromise what the students are paying for,” Perry said.