Soon, students can connect their laptops to the network by plugging into the connection slots fitted into the tables. They’ll also have more options to connect to the network, and the opportunity to work with a faster network connection than when using wifi. The change concerns approximately seven hundred workspaces on floor -1 and 0.

Board member mr. Jo van Ham says the decision has been made, ‘because connectivity complaints have been ongoing for a while now, and it’s an important workplace’. “Students want to work faster and with high capacity, and we couldn’t cater to them using wifi. We’ve wanted to get to the bottom of the issue, and optimized the situation to the best of our abilities. We’ve tried everything, but it turned out we couldn’t guarantee full connectivity.

Huub De Hesselle, head of the ICT department, says the building is a high density environment: “Students are carrying tablets in their backpacks, cell phones in their pockets, and put their laptops on their desks. All these devices connect to the wireless network, and that caused problems regularly, including slow or lost Internet connection.”

De Hesselle doesn’t want to attribute the issues to the crowds in the building exclusively, because the frequency of part of the wireless network wasn’t great, either. “From a technical perspective, MetaForum is a complex environment, as our supplier and external parties have confirmed. From the day of completion to a few weeks back, we’ve been working on improvement constantly. Over the past two weeks, the supplier’s best developers have been working on fixing the environment. They succeeded on the 5-gigahertz frequency, but fixing the 2.4-gigahertz frequency, used by most cell phones and tablets, remains a challenge.”

When asked if the relatively bad connectivity may have been expected upon realization of the building, Van Ham answers: “We try to take everything into consideration, but it’simpossible to assess all limitations of a building beforehand.” The money for the fixed network cabling will be debited from the ‘incidental expenses from the Campus 2020 baseline’.