Many students noticed a non-existent Wi-Fi connection on campus this week.
Dempsey Peterson, wireless network administrator, said he believes the cause could be related to a bug in the operating system code.
“We were getting some spotty indicators about certain mobile devices about a week ago and that is when we started looking into it,” Peterson said.
By Monday, students and faculty had no access to wireless Internet and open desktop computers in the library quickly became scarce.
“When the problem got fairly severe on Monday, I was able to get with the engineers of the equipment manufacturer and we’ve been working for several days trying to resolve the issue,” Peterson said. “We have actually been working to duplicate and resolve the issue since April 8.”
The company that produces the equipment is currently working to recreate the problem in their lab in California so they can help ACU get its system back online.
“One of the biggest problems with an issue like this is trying to consistently duplicate the problem in a test situation so that we can figure out how to fix it,” Peterson said.
As of Wednesday, Peterson said the system seems to be running now with only a few students having problems.
“Our system is designed with backup equipment for the wireless network, so when we finally determined which piece of equipment was causing the problem I was able to move everything over to the backup,” Peterson said.
Many students are still reporting to have to re-register their device for wireless access. Peterson said the typical solution for this problem would be to turn the device off and back on but that may not be the case in this instance.
Shelby Peterson, sophomore speech pathology major from Odessa, said the past few days have showed her how much she relies on the Internet.
“It wasn’t good because I couldn’t get any homework done, but it was kind of nice in the same sense because I couldn’t do anything without it,” she said.
In addition to wireless issues, many students’ ACU email accounts were not functioning Wednesday morning.
