Personal Wireless Routers

Personal wireless routers are NOT allowed in the residence halls.

Students living in residence halls are not able to set up their own wireless routers due to the risk of interference with our network devices. Our wireless network has over 400 wireless access points throughout the residence halls. These are “smart” access points and automatically adjust their power and range compared to other nearby access points to provide optimal connection and speed to students. This means that a personal wireless router may cause interference and slow down the network for many other nearby users. Depending on the amount of interference, other students may notice slower or less reliable internet while the owner of the personal router may experience a complete lack of connectivity.

The wireless access points in the halls use the same wired infrastructure as any personal wireless devices and will experience the same variable speed especially during peak hours. Using a personal wireless router will not increase network speed and will likely cause poor performance for the owner and for students nearby.

ResTek will identify personal wireless routers by using wireless network management tools. If a personal router is found to be creating harmful interference on the network, we will take steps to disable the device’s network connection.

If you want to use a wireless router to have more ports in your room, please contact us and we can assist you with disabling the wireless functionality of the router.