On January 2, 2023, Ellen Yu, the Chief Information Officer of Union College’s IT department announced in an email to Union students that the Resnet apogee network, before limited to dorm settings, had been expanded to cover most buildings on campus. 

According to Yu, this change was implemented to give students greater coverage of wireless connections, and is part of a larger initiative to modernize and upgrade campus infrastructure. 

One very convenient consequence of this upgrade is that students will no longer have to switch networks when in different locations, and now just have to login to the single ResNet network for. 

This change has not only consolidated the networks, but seems to also have eliminated locations with connection problems or areas where network performance had previously been low. 

Several locations, such as the Alumni Gym gas benefited greatly from this change, as signal strength before had been spotty.  

I used the Ookla “free wifi test” to measure several locations around campus to look at the performance of the network, and I generally saw pretty similar network speeds. I found that download/upload speeds varied from 44.6 to around 52.2 Mbps where networks were under little to no stress, later in the day. 

As outlined by Yu, the expansion should not affect security at the college as all Union networks require antivirus protection to join.