Overview
This article is to help Students, Faculty, and Staff understand why they are not allowed to bring in and connect a personal wi-fi router to the campus network.
Article Index
As outlined in the student handbook, at the bottom of pg. 79:
"The campus wireless network and the Internet is accessible from all academic,
administrative, student life, athletic, and residential halls, as well as the library,
classrooms, lounges and dining areas. Students are prohibited from establishing their
own wireless networks because of the potential interference they pose to the college
wireless network."
The largest concern is the security risk a personal router can introduce to the school's networking environment. An open router plugged into our network can allow a potential hacker access to resources usually kept behind the safety of the enterprise authentication methods we use to administer access to our wireless network.
One might think it would then be ok as long as they enable some form of password protection on this router, but home routers use weaker encryption methods, or passwords, where as the system we have created here at Ursinus uses enterprise grade equipment and access control methods.
NOTE: It is with security in mind that it is at the sole discretion of the Ursinus LIT team to disable network ports of which are believed to have a personal router connected to it, or contact a manager, or rez life counselor to address the issue further.
A common problem seen on campus caused by the introduction of personal wireless routers is the interference they cause to other users connected to the Ursinus Wireless network.
Ursinus's IT staff have deployed a wi-fi mesh system similar to ones you might have seen for sale at an electronics retail store, the difference is that ours is enterprise grade, and more suited to the amount of users then what a single household might have. This mesh allows the people using the Ursinus's wireless network to connect to the wireless on campus no matter what building they may be in. You might of seen our routers in the classrooms, common areas, and dorm rooms; they look like a small square box hanging on the wall or ceiling with glowing led lights.
All these devices work together to create what looks like one single wireless network to our students, faculty, staff, and guests, when in fact your devices may connect to several different routers as you move around in a building, this helps to ensures your devices have a reliable connection.
Why then does setting up your own router in the middle of all these routers cause interference? It's because our routers talk to each other in there own sort of language that allows them to broadcast a wireless signal to devices, but not talk over one another.
So when an unknown router is plugged in that doesn't communicate with the Ursinus wireless system, its overly chatty and talks over our routers as they communicate with your devices, this will cause interference with users who are connected in the surrounding area of this unknown router.
For the reasons outlined above we do not allow students to bring in and attach a wireless router to the network. We do allow students to bring in and attach an unmanaged network switch (please use this article to help choose the right one) to the network in order to expand the number of physical ports in their dorm rooms. This is because a network switch only works to forward the traffic along along a physical cable not the potentially crowded air waves; it has no intelligence to be exploited. And since it is a physical connection it is tremendously harder for a hacker to exploit unless they have physical access to your room and the port.
Having Trouble?
If you are having trouble connecting to the Ursinus Wi-fi please follow These instructions first, which will walk you through the correct steps to connect to the campus wireless network. Or use this article to go through some common troubleshooting steps.
If you continue to still have trouble connecting to the campus wireless network please submit a ticket to tech support using the following LINK.