BY PAIGE FITZPATRICK
After some issues with Hillspot in early October and frustration from students, IT hopes to educate student users on how their actions might be hurting wireless connection.
Chief Information Officer Tammy Anderson said the first incident of the semester occurred on Thursday, October 7, when there was a full network outage shutting down the wireless and wired connections.
While IT was in the process of figuring out the first outage, five days later, there was a second outage that shut down the whole network.
Director of Network Services Mark Tufts, and Manager of Network Services Peppino Muraca, diagnosed the issue as a problem with the two core routers in the Duffy data center that manage all the traffic coming from every building on campus.
“We have two routers that are physically separate boxes, but they need to talk to each other, and they weren’t synchronized appropriately, so they weren’t sharing information properly,” Muraca said.
Through the men’s efforts, IT was able to resolve the issues on Monday, October 25.
“It is definitely frustrating when the Wi-Fi goes out because lots of professors have you submit work on eLearn and when the Wi-Fi is down you can’t do that and I could be deducted points for being late, but IT is usually pretty quick to realize there is an issue and fix it in a timely manner,” senior Kaitlin Costa said.
While on the topic of Hillspot, the IT team wanted to discuss cases in which students experience issues with Wi-Fi in their residence halls and how students can all do their part to prevent them.
“The biggest issue with wireless and students experiencing unsatisfactory service in residence halls is interference,” Muraca said.
Interference can stem from devices that are brought in from students, he said. This can include things like printers that broadcast their own wireless network and degrade wireless connection, which will decrease its performance.
“If you have a printer and you’re not using it, unplug it, or if you know how to disable direct Wi-Fi printing you can disable it. That is our number one frustration because it’s not something we can fix ourselves, its coming from these machines,” Muraca said.
Anderson said that IT does have processes of trying to work with Residence Directors to educate students and monitor the wireless devices brought in by students, but they only have so much access to the space.
“I know of a lot of people who also have wireless printers and I was unaware that those printers and other devices interfere with our Wi-Fi, but after thinking about it, it makes sense,” Costa said.
Muraca said when he does walk throughs in the halls or looks at maps, he can see the machines that are causing connection issues, but it is frustrating because IT can only do some much, as they are not allowed in students rooms, so it is important to educate students on what they can do to help.
The wireless capacity at Stonehill is very good and it is built for the number of students and devices, Muraca said.
“At any given time, we have close to 6,000 connections on wireless. So, our equipment can perform to accommodate that it just can’t account for all the interference, which is where we struggle to try and make a better experience for the students,” Muraca said.
In order to combat the issues with wireless connections, IT hopes to educate students on how to be a good Wi-Fi citizen.
In a knowledge base article written by IT, they address more issues and solutions with devices that may be causing interference. According to the article, things like wireless speakers, wireless gaming controllers, hotspots, and more can cause interference.
To learn more about devices that cause interference and how to be a good Wi-Fi citizen, read the article written by IT here.