The University of Wisconsin campus has been experiencing intermittent campus-wide outages of the wireless internet system for the past week.
The source of the outage was a random connectivity issue, according to the Division of Information Technology’s outages information updates. The most affected places are buildings with classrooms during high traffic times of the day.
Residential areas were affected first, with an initial report on Sep. 7 at 12:30 p.m.
“Many users in Chadbourne and Witte Halls have been reporting wireless connection issues, either inability to connect or connection drops. Techs are looking into it,” the website said.
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The issues in the residential areas were later connected to a campus-wide issue.
The initial report on the campus-wide outage was made on Sep. 11 at 10:00 a.m. stating almost every building on campus had issues connecting to the internet.
On Sep. 14 at 5:00 p.m., an update stated the wireless connectivity problem had been solved and systems were “fully operational.” On Sep. 15 at 11:20 a.m., there had been continuing issues with the internet, according to the DOiT website statement.
Throughout the week, updates were posted on the DOiT website as UW network engineers worked with the internet vendor to solve the problem. On Tuesday morning, technologists took the first step in addressing the issue.
“DoIT Technologists installed new code for the UWNet and Eduroam Wireless Services at 5:00 A.M. [Tuesday] morning as the first step to addressing the Campus Wireless issues,” the website said.
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Students and faculty have been experiencing frustration in classes during the first week.
The first couple weeks of classes are a stressful time for students because they’re just getting back into the flow of things, UW sophomore Katie Jakubowski said. “We shouldn’t have to worry about accessing online materials in class.”
“I have to go all the way back to my apartment in between classes just so I can get some homework done,” Jakubowski said. “In lectures, professors aren’t able to access some of the materials they need, like online videos, and it can be distracting during class.”
The issue is still considered “ongoing,” and DOiT is continuing to work toward fixing the outage, according to their website.
