Another outage is planned for Friday morning from 2 a.m. to 3:30 a.m, the Office of Information Technology announced.
Serena Valente said recent Wi-Fi troubles at Ohio University are affecting her class work.
“In my chem class, we do everything online. And when the professor asked if anyone was having problems, everyone’s hand in the class shot up,” the sophomore studying biological sciences and pre-physical therapy said.
One final outage should solve the Wi-Fi troubles that have disturbed the first two weeks of classes.
The final outage occurred Friday morning from 2 a.m. to 3:30 a.m. The Office of Information Technology alerted students and faculty to the outage in an email Thursday.
The Wi-Fi was out Thursday morning to install new equipment to handle the surplus of devices on campus this year.
“(Thursday) morning’s upgrade was successful,” Sean O’Malley, an OIT spokesman, said. “The problems have gone away.”
Friday’s outage “will greatly increase our network’s reliability by allowing either of our new core switches to automatically start handling all Wi-Fi traffic should its companion unit have a problem,” O’Malley said in the email to students and faculty.
O’Malley said the installation of backup equipment should prevent any further problems with the Wi-Fi.
“We don’t want to run into a problem in the … foreseeable future,” Craig Bantz, chief information officer at OIT, said.
Bantz, who was up for 36 hours working to solve the problem, said Friday’s outage is the last scheduled one.
The OIT team worked around the clock to solve the problem as quickly as possible, Bantz said.
“We know the hunger for Wi-Fi is growing,” he said.
After the first set of equipment failed to solve the problem, a new batch was flown on a chartered plane from •California.
An engineer even drove down from Michigan to help with the installation of the equipment.
With 17,000 more devices on campus this year than in previous years, the Wi-Fi was unable to sustain all the devices through the start of classes.
Sitting in a chair on the first floor of Baker Center, Valente said, “It works in this spot!”
Rebecca Prosh, a freshman studying microbiology, has resorted to a tethered connection until the problem is fixed.
“I’ve had to use an ethernet cable in my dorm,” she said. “I have not been able to connect otherwise.”
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