Students of the University of Ghana may have to brace themselves up for limited internet access as authorities at the University of Ghana Computing Systems (UGCS) are considering the allocation of data bandwidth to students to be used per month.
The allocation of data bandwidth to students means that students of the university will, for every month, be given an amount of data to be used within the month.
Should the data be exhausted before the end of the month, students would perhaps, have to find other means of securing internet access.
According to the Deputy Chief I.T Officer at the University of Ghana Computing Systems (UGCS), Mr. Francis Boakye, the attitude of students sharing their Wi-Fi login details with friends and families was exerting further pressure on the university’s internet facility.
In an interview with Mr. Boakye, he stated that UGCS would soon restrict data usage by students by allocating data bandwidth per month to students within the next few months.
“…students will be allocated bandwidth according to what we have agreed…if every student has 10GB for a month
then that will be the case. If you give yours to your friend or brother, then once it is used, it is used, you will never get access until the next month” – Mr. Boakye indicated.
According to Mr. Boakye, the University has made strides in increasing internet access to students over the past few months however unchecked internet usage among others continue to be a major setback in their operations.
According to him despite management’s efforts to increase internet access, the growing student populace continues to exert more pressure on the internet facility and thus making the bandwidth inadequate.
He explained that due to the high cost of internet bandwidth across the world, UGCS was struggling to sufficiently use the available resource at its disposal to effectively serve students.
“In 2018, the whole university had only 5mb/s internet access, today we have 1000mb/s from Vodafone and we’re currently testing another 1000mb/s…so the university in total for the past 2months had 2000mb/s for internet so that is huge” he said
“The population of the university has increased and the demand for internet service has also increased. This semester, we have not restricted YouTube because we had the additional 1000mb/s” he added.
Mr. Francis Boakye however stressed that the challenges with internet accessibility is not essentially borne out of financial constraints but rather a problem of unrestrained data usage by students.
He explained that the revenue received by the university is allocated to other departments of urgency which includes UGCS however the university cannot focus its entire resource on internet at the expense of other equally important areas.
“It is not necessarily UGCS constraint with money. Money of the university of Ghana has to be spent in such a way that it can’t only be spent on bandwidth…the university has to deal with so many things with the same amount of money that we receive” he noted
Story by: David Quaye & Jeffrey Nyabor/universnewsroom.com
This is just dumb. My student ID stops working for up to 2 weeks and I get feedback saying incorrect password. I could be using it at times then it’d say I should put in the password again and I’ll receive the incorrect password feedback again.
So if I want to or need to use the student WiFi, isn’t it only common sense to use the ID of my friend?