Throughout the first few weeks of school, msu1x, the free wireless Internet service provided to Mississippi State University students and faculty, was the cause of some strife across campus due to the connectivity difficulties people were experiencing with it.
Deputy CIO and director of IT Infrastructure, Timothy Griffin, said the sporadic network access on msu1x during the first month of school was caused by a trio of problems.
He said the main problem came to light in concurrence with student move-in day.
“We actually had a hardware problem within one of our six major core hubs out of McArthur Hall. Most of the wireless network is routed through that particular device, and when the problem first started, we were pushed over the edge by load. Everyone moved in and usage from the summer went up, which uncovered the hardware problem,” Griffin said.
Griffin said once the problem was uncovered, Information Technology Services was able to address it with only a few episodes of sluggishness on msu1x.
He went on to say an additional problem was caused by Network Address Translation.
ITS at MSU has seen the number of wireless devices on campus grow exponentially, with 11,000 users during campus’s peak hours.
Griffin said to remedy the growing problem, ITS had to add more addresses. However with wireless usage growing, ITS could foresee the campus running out of addresses this fall and initiated moving the wireless network to private addresses.
“What that means is that you’re actually sharing public addresses among multiple private users,” he said. “The problem is when we implemented that wireless network, we didn’t know it, but we found out quickly we were exceeding CPU processor resources on some of the devices.”
Griffin said the problem has been addressed, and ITS is still in the process of correcting it entirely without affecting the public.
He also said in highly-populated student classrooms, resident halls and hangout spots around campus another problem was affecting internet access.
This problem first came to light this fall as students began taking residence in Oak Hall and Magnolia Hall.
Oak and Magnolia have the most access points per square foot for wireless portals, and were able to best illustrate the growing problem.
“The best way to describe it is spectrum saturation. All the access points on campus support 802.11 A, B, G and N. 802.11 B is the oldest and slowest of those technologies, and was the first Wi-Fi speck,” Griffin said.
Griffin said campus has very few 802.11 B devices left on campus, however, the wireless devices that are on the fringe of coverage were connecting to the B devices at low wi-fi rates and receiving little to no Wi-Fi coverage on some devices.
This fall ITS saw a significant rise in the amount of wireless devices on campus, as well as users with multiple wireless devices running on the Wi-Fi simultaneously.
Griffin said the solution ITS enacted was cutting the B devices off, which gives the devices the ability to connect to G and A rates with a better connection.
He said this has been successful and ITS has enacted the same protocols campus wide.
In some locations across campus additional access points have been added, which increase Wi-Fi availability.
Those locations include Mitchell Memorial Library, McCool Hall, Colvard Student Union and Allen Hall.

“Right now we have just over 1,300 access points that make up the campus wireless network, and we’ve got another couple hundred we’re in the process of employing,” Griffin said. “So it is already better and it is going to continue to get better.”