Winona State University’s Tech Support department has implemented a new WiFi network called BYODWSU into the dorms this semester. BYODWSU, which stands for Bring Your Own Device WSU, has been a work in progress since last spring.

Rachel Svenningson, technical support specilist, said, “We started working on it last spring and it was only available in a few of the dorms, but it is now available in all of the dorms.”

BYODWSU was created to solve the issue of students not being able to connect to the Warrior Network with their personal devices, such as Xbox’s, SmartTV’s and Chromecast’s.

Micah Droessler, the lead network administrator for Winona State, said, “Many people from WSU’s Housing Department were asking that we addressed the issue of users not being able to get their personal devices online.”

Svenningson said that before BYODWSU was created, students had to use an Ethernet cord to connect personal devices to the internet.

“This new network is providing access for those devices that just don’t have the same authentication that the Warrior Network needs to connect to it,” Svenningson said. “Any time there’s new students living on campus that come (to Winona State) with their devices… that just didn’t connect before. We would always see that at the beginning of the year, after Thanksgiving and after Winter Break because that is around the time that people buy things.”

There are also many new access points in the dorms, according to Svenningson.

“They put them in just about every other dorm room to enhance the WiFi,” Svenningson said. “Hopefully people are going to get a more reliable network in their dorm rooms.”

Both Droessler and Svenningson said that the Tech Support department knew that more money needed to be put into creating better networks when an overwhelming number of students expressed their unhappiness with the dorm WiFi networks in their student surveys.

“They went off the satisfaction surveys that they sent out to the students and realized that they needed to put a lot of money into the network in the dorms,” Svenningson said.

The wireless system was also getting slowed down quite a bit due to the growth of wireless printers on campus. Svenningson encourages students to turn the WiFi settings on their printers off if they are not in use, or instead just using the campus printers.

Students should not be using the BYODWSU network with their cellphones and Winona State provided laptops.

“If they can connect to Warrior, they should be connecting to Warrior… You really don’t want to be putting devices such as cellphones and laptops on this network (BYODWSU). It is not a private network like the Warrior network is,” Svenningson said.

Lastly, it is recommended to go to Tech Support if you are having any issues either with your devices or if you are having issues connecting to the campus networks.

“The biggest thing is if people are having issues, they should get ahold of Tech Support so their issues can be addressed sooner rather than later,” Droessler said.