How Open Is The Net?

Imagine this. Your assignment deadline is in a few minutes. Everything is going smoothly, and you are confident you will achieve the grade you are aiming for. You click submit in Canvas, and it starts loading. You continue to wait, but it is still going. You begin to panic and start refreshing the whole browser. The connection is lost, and by the time you reconnect, the deadline has passed.  

This may be an over-exaggeration, but it encapsulates the AUBG experience with the Internet access on campus. Since Fall 2024, the Internet and, more specifically, Open-Net, completely changed the way it interacts with users. You can no longer automatically connect to the network after you have already done so and once you connect, you have two hours before you are kicked off, according to the student representative to the IT committee, Andrija Curcic. 

When connecting to Open-Net a portal will pop up asking you to confirm the use of the network. Adrija says that this was done because the network can be used by anyone outside of the AUBG community such as passersby through the café or people in the area of the AUBG campus. The goal is to make sure there is no network overload and that no malicious activities are happening on the network.  

Andrija has been a student representative to the IT committee since Fall 2024, when the change to Open-Net had already been approved and carried out. However, he wants to be certain that all student concerns regarding the Internet are presented in front of the committee, which then decides what can be implemented.  

At the beginning of February, a survey was sent out to all students and faculty, which received a total of 573 responses being sent back to the IT committee. The most common complaints, according to Andrija, are network interruptions and the need for users to frequently re-log to gain access to the network. According to the results, 31.85% of respondents experience issues with Open-Net all the time, and 28.45% experience issues frequently.  

Andrija suspects this issue is also linked to frequent disconnections regarding the pop-up portal. Comments in the survey suggest this is an issue because of the unequal distribution of the network throughout the residence halls. “One of the more frequent things that you can see in the survey is that people complain that in some of the basements, for example, in the Skapto 2 games room, there is very rarely or no Internet access,” says Adrija. 

Another issue students have, based on the survey, relates to difficulty connecting to the AUBG-SetupPPC page, which is a network that exists for the sole purpose of connecting to the AUBG-Students network. “I've seen that some people are unaware of a recent change that has been added to Setup-PPC that even I was unaware of,” said Andrija.  

He explains “There has been a recent update to the way that registering your device happens and it is now a system which is fully automated. It works 24/7 and instead of you having to wait until after 5 p.m., when you put in the MAC address of your device into the system, after 10 minutes, you should already be able to join AUBG-Students.” However, people still complain that they must provide a MAC address to begin with. 

The IT committee will decide how to act upon the results of the survey, but students can see updates through the Student Government meeting recaps. Everything that is talked about in those meetings is sent to students via email weekly with full documentation of the progress across all departments, not just IT.  

“I'm doing everything I can that these concerns and issues are heard as loud and clear as possible, but it is just that we, as a committee, have to look at solutions and find, after we've seen all the issues and complaints conducted in the survey, what is to be done, how it is to be done, and deploy the solution to all the stakeholders,” says Andrija.  

 

Editors: Spasiela Gizdova and Toma Krumov