Many NIU students could claim the Internet is just as important to their lives as food, air and water. But when access to the Internet is impeded, things become problematic.

During the past few weeks, some students on campus have complained about difficulties accessing the Internet.

“I’ve been without Internet for two weeks now,” said junior accountancy major Emma Asamoah. “I had the Clean Access Agent on, but it still wouldn’t let me in.

I’ve had to come to the computer lab every day now.”

A requirement for all students’ computers on campus is to download the McAfee virus protection program and the Cisco Clean Access Agent, which is specifically what many students claim to have problems with.

The Cisco Clean Access Agent is a sort of gate-keeping program that protects the NIU network from potentially harmful computers that try to connect to it.

It validates whether or not a student’s computer is clean and safe to access the network.

There are some students that have managed to connect to the Internet, but have complaints about its performance.

“The Internet’s really slow sometimes and then I won’t be able to log in to Facebook or AIM,” said Nick Desai, a sophomore biological sciences major.

“When it’s slow, it would take like five minutes to load a page.”

Other students have not encountered problems.

“I’ve had no problems with the Internet,” said senior English major Erika Sparby. “Every time I get on, it’s been fine for me. I used ResTech once last semester to get my computer online and they did fine.”

Addressing these problems to help students is the Residential Technology department, which works to maintain the connections of approximately 4,500 online students in the residence halls.

Jan Gerenstein, the associate director of ResTech, said student problem reports are important to network development.

“We want students to be online; in addition, student reports of problems often help network engineers identify more global problems with the network,” Gerenstein said.

Gerenstein said this has been one of the best fall semester start-ups.

As of now, ResTech’s goal is to continue to work with Information Technology Services to expand the coverage of the wireless network throughout the residence halls, which is said to be the number one request from students.