Around 500 newly arrived international students were left without internet this week with LU Accommodation informing them of this problem…via email.
A change in ownership of the municipality’s internet provider, qmarket, has lead to much of Lund’s international community finding that their new accommodation has no internet. This left LU Accommodation seemingly in turmoil as they sought to communicate with the affected students through email.
“The problem is with our new accommodations, there are always issues when we first move to a place. But we are working intensely to resolve these and hope that everything will be back to normal in a couple of weeks,” said Sara van Lunteren, officer at LU Accommodation.
“And it’s not just us, AFB Housing has had the same problem, ” she adds.
Only swedish personal numbers
The reasons for the problems were attributed to a change in ownership and policy of internet providers. They were requiring full Swedish personal numbers to take up an internet plan, not the temporary numbers assigned to exchange students:
“There have previously always been at least two operators who have offered contracts in English and to people without Swedish personal numbers. But this year they had removed this option without warning.” explained Sara.
LU Accommodation sent out an email informing affected students that they “can’t order internet online” – a somewhat questionable approach given that the affected students are unable to easily access their emails without internet.
Low privacy protection
In addition, in a spectacular failure for privacy protection, LU Accommodation sent the email openly detailing the personal email addresses of the affected students.
The email did provide some useful advice for registering with Bredband2, an internet provider in Sweden but this created a race to call the company that left some students on hold for several hours.
“We are surprised that the operators took so long to get things in order but if you look on the Qmarket webpage now there should be clearer instructions for registering with Bredband2,” informed Sara, adding that:
“We hope to have the problem resolved within the next couple of weeks and it certainly shouldn’t happen for the next group of students who arrive here.”
Borrowing wi-fi
But in the meantime students have been left to “borrow” the internet of their Wi-Fi using corridor-mates or make the journey to the university campus or a coffee shop to check on the progress of the situation.
“We are working hard to resolve the problems but any students still struggling should not hesitate to contact us via telephone or by coming down to the office and we can try to resolve the situation in person.”
Lundagard has contacted internet provider “Bredband2” and the municipality’s service provider “Qmarket” and “Lunds öppna statsnät” for comments without any response.
