I’m on the internet for a good third of my waking life.

Whether I’m chatting, playing video games, or writing fiction with pen-pals, I spend a great deal of time online, and I’m sure many other students do as well.

I appreciate fast Internet connections and connections that are up all the time, especially in the early hours each morning – I work until midnight when copy editing at the newspaper.

Eastern normally has a fast and reliable internet connection.

Our Web site claims to have a T1 connection 300 times faster than the average ISP (equivalent to a 56k modem), and over 3 times faster than DSL.

The problem is, this claim is deceptive. Our network has not been reliable 24/7.

Lately, the connection latency has been pretty good.

But for the last week or so, since before Oct. 21, which is when I last checked in with the IT department, the internet quality plummeted.

My online games were pinging at around 8000 or so ms, which gauges the amount of time it takes for information to be sent on the network.

At around 500 ms, gameplay becomes choppy, delayed and nearly incoherent.

Playing online was simply an impossible task.

Gaming aside, just web browsing was impossible. Connection to Google and other Web sites took nearly a minute.

Downloading .pdf files and mp3s went at a rate of barely 8 kilobytes per second.

That the equivalent of my 56k dial-up modem at home.

It took me nearly an hour to download a single song on iTunes.

Going to and from news sites was just as sluggish.

I could hardly get any online research done during that week.

Going to the Gregg Triad computer lab didn’t help either – it appeared that all of last week, campus was moving at an unacceptable snail’s pace.

I spoke with some IT technicians at the computer lab desk Oct. 23, and they said they were aware of the problem, and that it had been happening for a week . and they didn’t know how to fix it.

Even more discouraging was hearing that the IT technicians spoke with some of the higher-ups in networking, and apparently those people didn’t know what was causing the problems.

I can understand the difficulty of trying to make high-speed internet available all the time to more than 10,000 students in a concentrated area, but making the claim on our Web site is deceiving, if even for one week all of campus is getting slow connections.

We students are paying in our fees for high-speed Ethernet access that is available around the clock.

I am thankful the situation was resolved for this week, but even a week in a student’s life can throw schedules off.