On Wednesday evening, University Information Services and InterHall held a town hall meeting at which students and university officials discussed plans to install wireless infrastructure in residence halls on campus.

Organized under the initiative of William Cousino (SFS ’12), InterHall’s vice president for student advocacy, the meeting gave students a chance to provide feedback and meet with UIS officials including Donna White, associate director of UIS, Raphael Terranus, UIS Help Desk manager, and Michelle Lapin, UIS enterprise product manager.

“I met with [White] pretty much monthly [starting] last spring,” Cousino said. “This meeting tonight was the culmination of the dialogue about a way for UIS to better contact students.”

The meeting began with a presentation on the services provided by UIS and was followed by a Q-and-A session, which provided students with the opportunity to ask about UIS’ plans for introducing wireless to residence halls.

“We’ve been working on designing a new wireless infrastructure for a year and a half now,” White explained to the audience.

According to White, plans to provide the over 80 buildings on campus – 13 of which are residence halls – with wireless connection have taken a long time to complete due to concerns over sustaining the system once it has been established.

“We’re very cautious about how we deploy things, especially when it comes to affecting the entire community,” White said.

Students raised concerns about the current structure and plans to upgrade the system, including providing wireless to areas that currently have no connection.

“We have approximately 900 to 1,000 [Access Points, which provide wireless Internet connection] already deployed on campus,” White said. “It’s very extensive and very expensive to deploy a new wireless infrastructure.”

White assured students, however, that the detail design has been completed and that UIS is in the process of evaluating its current solution, which is at an advanced stage.

“Residences are at the top [of our priority list],” she added. Some residence halls take precedence, according to White, including Village A, Village B, Harbin, New South and Nevils.

White concluded the meeting by saying that feedback from students is helpful to stepping up the pace of the process. Cousino addressed concerns over why it has taken time to organize a town hall with UIS on the wireless issue.

“The reason a meeting like this hasn’t happened before is because nobody’s always certain whom the right individuals to talk to are,” he explained. “Tonight, we managed to do that.”