Enhancing the Wireless Experience for Residence Students

Our campus wireless system has access to a limited number of applications in order to keep its usage in line with the academic and research orientation of the University of Windsor. To enhance the experience for residence students, adjustments are being made to the wireless network to provide a wider range of service. A new connection point for students in residence has been created to allow access to these extra features. This SSID (uwindsor_residence) will be available only in residence buildings and is intended for use only by residence students and associated support staff. With every new system there is a test period. During the testing period the connection’s name will be uwindsor_restest. Residence students are welcome to use the system during this testing period, however, it is available on an `as is’ basis and may not be fully functional at all times.

Generally speaking, anything you can do on the University’s wired network you can do on the residence wireless network. The University’s internet traffic consists of two main parts: normal university usage and enhanced residence, `non-academic’ usage. A portion of our internet bandwidth has been allocated to these non-academic activities. The portion available for these activities will vary depending upon the time of day and the amount of bandwidth available. Real time activities such as a web page requests will be favoured over large downloads such as ftp transfers or iTunes purchases.

In order to protect your system and the campus, you may be able to connect to the internet and download sites, but setting up an application or service that accepts requests for gaming or file access or some other service on your machine from devices outside of residence is not supported.

Similarly, in order to protect your system and the campus, direct wireless to wireless activity is currently disabled. For optimal security, the enhanced residence wireless system will use `802.1x enterprise’ access and encryption. The existing wireless networks (uwindsor and uwindsor_secure) will also be available for consistency and convenience.

If you experience difficulties or have any concerns with the new Residence Wireless network please contact the ITS Helpdesk at HelpDesk@uwindsor.ca or via telephone at extension 4440.

This document is expected to change over time.  Please check back frequently.

For help on making uwindsor_residence your default wireless network select one of the documents below.

Residence Wireless for XP

Residence Wireless for Vista / 7

Residence Wireless for MacIntosh (under construction)

UPDATE INFORMATION

January 1, 2012
After successfully testing the University's Enhanced Residence Wireless network (uwindsor_restest) last fall it has now been promoted to a permanent status. The new Enhanced Residence Wireless network can now be found in your network list as "uwindsor_residence" .  The objective of this network is to provide to students living in the University's residences a more "at home-like" connection with a much more "open" feeling than other campus wireless connections.  Sorry, but the special features are only available to students registered to stay in the University's residence buildings. But, along with the extra features and "open-ness" comes greater responsibility and accountability for actions occuring under your UWIN ID.  Please review the University's Acceptable Use Policy at http://www.uwindsor.ca/its/wireless/wireless-acceptable-use-guidelines.

October 1, 2001
Cartier residence has been selected to begin an initial pilot roll-out for access to the new uwindsor_residence (uwindsor_restest) enhanced wireless network.  The pilot is scheduled to open when the University returns from our Thanksgiving break, October 11th, 2011.  Once the system has proven to be stable and all issues addressed the pilot will be gradually expanded to include additional residences.

Again, if you experience any difficulties with the network or have any concerns please contact the HelpDesk.