Students are struggling to access the Internet while on university WiFi.
Students and professors at Ohio University are struggling to access the Internet throughout campus after initial Wi-Fi problems emerged Monday.
The source of the problem is the nearly 17,000 more Wi-Fi-equipped devices on campus than there were this time last year.
“The core of the problem is that the number of devices is radically increased this year,” Craig Bantz, chief information officer at Office of Information Technology, said.
Bantz said an influx of smart televisions, video game consoles, laptops and tablets all contributed to the jump. Students no longer have one or two Wi-Fi-equipped devices.
Classrooms have also been disrupted by the faulty connections.
Jillian Stelletell, a senior studying social work, said her professor struggled to get the Wi-Fi working during class.
“It took like 10 minutes to get the syllabus brought up, so we kind of just hung out,” Stelletell said.
The university typically expects an increase of about 1,000 devices after Christmas break, Sean O’Malley, an OIT spokesman, said, and some slight increases from year to year. A jump of 17,000, O’Malley said, is unprecedented.
“It’s gone up every year but it’s been more incremental,” O’Malley said. “This is a huge jump.”
The technology OU uses to support its Wi-Fi — Juniper Networks — should be able to support even more than the amount of devices using it, but it’s failing, Bantz said.
“It overwhelmed our router,” O’Malley said. “There was no way to see this coming.”
But they’re working to fix it.
“We know what equipment we need now,” Bantz said. “Getting the equipment here, we expect to happen in a couple of days.”
OIT hopes for the installation to disrupt students as little as possible. The upgrade process will start about 2 a.m. the day after the equipment makes it to OU, Bantz said. They don’t have a solid date for when that equipment will arrive.
In the few hours that follow, little bits of the network will turn off for a moment and turn back on, he said.
“Ultimately we’ll have to reboot the whole thing,” he said. “We’ll have a few hours of interruptions and then a big thirty-minute shebang.”
Some students are hoping for a speedy solution as classes start to ramp up.
“I don’t think it’s become much of a problem because I don’t have as much stuff to do yet, but if it stays this way it’s definitely going to interfere with my classwork,” Emily Schafer, a junior studying long-term health care administration, said.
Bantz said the OIT team has been working 24/7 to remedy the situation.
“I think our response is atypical of higher education,” Bantz said. “I think it’s almost a moral obligation we have.”
@taymaple
