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Unlike Starbucks and other small businesses that offer wireless service, Pontiff said, a campus wireless network has to be ready to serve complicated, secure options to 5,000 accounts. The library’s wireless service will be activated once all security options are properly configured and tested.

“Wireless is not unlike leaving your front door wide open in the middle of the summer while you take a walk,” he said. “You are vulnerable to attack.”

The library was wired last year, said Pontiff, though ITS has been thinking and planning for the service for three years previous to this fall.

Many first-year students began this year expecting a wireless network.

Dax Young, HUSC technology coordinator, is eagerly awaiting the arrival of the wireless network. He believes it should be standard for private universities.

“It’s the university’s responsibility to offer wireless capabilities to the students who want that maneuverability,” he said. “Hamline is a private university where students pay a higher-than-average tuition fee, and I think that students deserve to have higher-than-average technology resources.”

Though Pontiff attributes the current lack of wireless Internet partially to security reasons, he says the larger problem at hand is inadequate staffing resources.

According to Pontiff and Craig Falon, who is in charge of hardware, ITS has been operating with the same staff since most Hamline seniors began high school.

“Eight years ago, there was no network in the dorms,” Falon said. “Today almost everyone has a computer.”

In those eight years, ITS has made Hamline as technologically advanced as resources allowed, without a single staff increasečbut that will change. Pontiff said he plans to hire a network engineer, the first new ITS staff addition since 1995.

However, this addition still will not provide an ideal situation, one where staff can specialize in one or two areas.

“In order to make [ITS] work,” Pontiff said, “everyone in the unit will eventually be cross-trained in all aspects so folks can back each other up.”

In December, a Tier Three technician will also be hired to assist the small staff with maintaining the large number of campus computers and printers.

“These folks will contribute immensely towards the achievement of our goals,” Pontiff said. “Whether they will be enough is a question relative to where we want to go.”

While Pontiff realizes technology is evolving faster than people’s expectations and budgets, he believes that with the strategic-planning efforts currently underway, future priorities will be identified such that expectations and the resources to achieve them will be better matched.

Finances have also played a huge role in the delay of wireless on campus. ITS operates for all five Hamline schools, and each school has different priorities.

“The competing expectations for technology at each of these schools brings a compounding factor to the level of expectations that each student, faculty and staff member presents,” Pontiff said.

“Wireless, therefore, at an institution such as ours, needs to be seen and evaluated as one piece of a much larger puzzle for providing the best teaching and learning services to such a disparate audience.”

CLA senior Jon Guyer expects wireless to will happen soon.

“I have heard wireless mentioned since my first year, and it hasn’t happened,” Guyer said. “Hopefully this is the year. It’s becoming mainstream, and as a worker at the Bush Library circulation desk, students often ask whether or not [the library] has a wireless network. When I say ‘no,’ I get a surprised look.”

Guyer, however, is not without concern about the negative effects wireless may have on campus.

“I worry that given the small size of our IT staff and a small budget, wireless will be slowly deployed,” he said, “and once they’re deployed, other services will be cut back. I also worry that since the residence-hall network is slower than other campus-networked computers, the wireless will not be all that fast.”