Story by Anna-Jo Stuart, Reporter
Photo courtesy of Pexels.com

On Nov. 6 students experienced issues connecting to the on-campus internet — an issue that persisted through Nov. 11. Students were left to either use a weaker wireless guest connection option, or an Aquinas desktop computer to access the internet. This created frustrations with students and faculty during the six days that the internet issue persisted.

George Vieweg, interim chief information officer, said that the issue with the Wi-fi was due to an aging infrastructure that failed. During the failure, the ITS department worked to troubleshoot and resolve the issue out-of-hours and over the weekend.

Moving forward, the entire wireless system is being upgraded this year via an $800,000 investment by Aquinas. The investment is going towards assessing the current wireless system, replacing wiring and the aging infrastructure.

Vieweg says that priority has been given to student living spaces, with the first implementation and installation of the new wireless systems to begin in the next several weeks.

Vieweg added, “We appreciate the patience of the students as well as the larger campus community as we worked to resolve these issues and improve the experience going forward.”

The following timeline was released by the ITS department on The Moose regarding the upgrade process:

“The ITS department continues to take action on the various steps necessary to provide the Aquinas campus with upgraded wireless technology.

As a reminder, we are focused on improving the residence halls first, followed by academic and office space, and the outdoor space.

The timeline below highlights the key steps to-date since the project’s inception:

• September: Conduct a survey of the residence halls to determine the number of access points necessary for optimum functionality.
• Late October: Replace the core switch hardware that operates the foundation of the computer system.
• Order and receive wireless access points for installation.
• Order controllers to operate the wireless access points.
• Installation of the controllers is in process.
• Conduct a survey of all academic and office space.
• Review cabling installation quote – in process.

Over the course of the next month, we expect to run cable and install wireless access points in the residence halls. More specific details will be forthcoming from Residence Life.”