On a campus where most students rely on wireless Internet for homework, research, scheduling, and entertainment, a wireless outage like the one last Friday, Feb. 10, wreaks havoc.
Luckily, the short-term outage is now completely fixed, said Patrick Chartrand, network systems manager at Information Technology Services.
“[With] bad hardware [it] is often hard to diagnose exactly which component is bad. In this case we were thinking is was a configuration issue,” he said. “In the end we discovered it was a bad fiber optic module. The faulty hardware has been replaced, so it should not affect anyone in the future.”
The outage on Friday was the second recent manifestation of the problem.
But Chartrand said now that ITS has fixed the fiber optic module, he does not expect any more wireless problems in the near future, especially not of this nature.
“The first time we did not recognize it was a hardware issue and we simply worked around it,” Chartrand said.
But Chartrand cautioned that there is no guarantee when working with wireless technology.
“Wireless in general is problematic,” he said.
