HASCS officials admit that the improvement was long overdue.

Steen says HASCS was wrong to assume that it was no big deal for students to wait for their connection.

"It's really not," he says. "You want to get registered right away."

Within the Houses and first-year dorms, at least, Davis says he suspects there is plenty of roaming going on when students want to relocate their computers within their suite. If suite-mates decide to swap rooms mid-way through the year, for example, they no longer need to wait a day or two to reconnect to the network.

And while students may not appreciate or even notice these types of side benefits to roaming, HASCS contends that they are significant, especially given that roaming Ethernet is largely a side benefit in itself.

According to Davis, roaming is just part of a larger system overhaul--a three-year upgrade from a shared access network system based on hubs to a switch network.

In the old system, packets of data were gathered in hubs in places like House basements. That information was then broadcast to all the computers on the network--and most of those computers simply ignored the data.

The hub system faced serious security concerns because of its vulnerability to "packet-sniffing," a practice by which hackers can illegally pick up data not intended for them.