Austin Rickel, music business sophomore, decided that enough was enough. To make his and the Loyola community’s frustration heard, Rickel created Loyola Students for Better Wifi, a Facebook group to protest the slow wifi.

As of Nov. 4, the group had 737 members who voice their complaints and share their frustrations on a daily basis.

Rickel said that the slow Wifi adds to the stress of students, especially when they are trying to get school tasks done.

“This Wifi issue is just making this semester that much harder for students not to feel stressed. I think that’s why this is such a huge outcry for Loyola to fix it,” Rickel said.

Among the students who have noticed the connectivity issue is Tyler Lindsay, performance junior, who said that he’s tried both wifi connectivity and ethernet connectivity but has had problems with both.

“It’s gotten worse this year from last. Watching a video for philosophy class? Nope. Trying to download a document to read for history? Nope. It’s incredibly aggravating and it hinders me from doing any and all course work that I do online. It even shut down during a quiz once. Thankfully my teacher was understanding,” Lindsay said.

Not only is the wifi an inconvenience for students who are trying to get work done directly on campus, but students who are trying to reach out to others out of state or overseas. Nicole Daniel, forensic science and chemistry junior, works as a residential assistant for freshmen and says she notices the wifi negatively affecting her residents when trying to contact home.

“For those that are homesick and want to skype with family and friends, the inability to do so because of bad wifi becomes a threat to the mental and emotional well-being of the student,” Daniel said.

Students aren’t the only people who are disappointed with the Wifi. Faculty are also affected by the slow connectivity. Lisa Collins, mass communication visiting professor, says the slow wifi affects class time with her students.

“It’s really painful to have to stop what I’m doing to deal with the wifi. It slows down the class, and it’s frustrating as a professor. I feel like I’m wasting my students’ time. It throws me off my train of thought when I’m trying to make a point,” Collins said.

Collins said that the internet is a teaching tool, and that the university should make it a priority to fix it.

“It’s just a bad experience for the student and that’s the bottom line. I want to be able to show my students good work. It sucks,” Collins said.

Bret Jacobs, vice provost for Information Technology, said that the sluggish connection is not directly related to the school’s wifi, but the overall internet bandwidth. Jacobs said that a spike in utilization was detected this semester, and that he contacted the internet providers to increase bandwidth on campus.

“The first phase of this increase was implemented on Oct. 27 and provided a 300% increase in bandwidth from one provider. After this first increase in bandwidth, we are now well under our overall bandwidth cap. The second phase of increasing our overall bandwidth is planned for completion in the next few weeks which will add similar capacity from our secondary provider,” Jacobs said.

According to Jacobs, a good solution to this would be reporting each incident that a student or faculty member may be having with the wifi.

“I would like to encourage all community members to contact the Information Technology help desk to report any and all network issues. We take all calls very seriously and need everyone’s input to ensure that we provide the best services possible,” Jacobs said.

As for Loyola Students for Better Wifi, Rickel hopes that his group will make it clear on how serious the Wifi issue really is.

“It’s one thing to not be able to watch Game of Thrones at any point anywhere on campus. Wifi is now an essential tool necessary for students and professors to interact and learn. This problem actually helped me realize how much we truly rely on Wifi for many aspects of our college experience,” Rickel said.