Throughout August and September, issues such as Wi–Fi connection problems in Phelps Hall and The Courtyard, the lack of hot water in Thomson, pipe leaks in The Courtyard and a power outage in the DiGiorgio Campus Center have disrupted students’ lives.
Wi–Fi outages, despite reports originating mostly from Phelps and Courtyard residence halls, have been reported all over campus.
Assistant Vice President for Computing and Information Technology Patrice Bruneau said he is aware of the Wi–Fi issues, and despite securing funding to “completely refresh the Wi–Fi around campus,” time is needed to implement these improvements.
“We haven’t even placed the order yet,” Bruneau said. “Somebody needs to come and survey for where we need to add the equipment.
“There is, like, a design phase where an engineer will decide how the wiring needs to go and all that and place the order. Then the equipment has to be received, and we start.
“My guess, and this is just a guess, is that it’s going to be late spring semester or early summer before we start redoing anything.”
Students, however, are having issues now. Freshman philosophy and religion major Stormy Brown said she was having issues connecting even on her cellular data when inside Thomson Hall, where she lives.
“[The Wi–Fi] never works. Both the [“winthropsecure”] and the [“winthropGuest”], and I never get a signal when I use my data,” Brown said. “I was making an appointment for Health Services, and I couldn’t fill out the form I was supposed to because both the Wi–Fi and the signal were out.”
Bruneau said the issue with on-campus Wi–Fi is not with bandwidth but with the hardware. The Wi–Fi on campus is able to handle 3,000 megabytes per second (MB/s), and according to a utilization report from Segra, Winthrop’s internet provider, usage in September peaked on Sept. 8 at 2,953 MB/s, while other weeks saw peaks at 2,275 MB/s and 2,097 MB/s.
The areas with the biggest Wi–Fi issues, according to Bruneau, are Phelps Hall and The Courtyard, each with its own challenge.
Phelps Hall, which Bruneau identified as the area with the most complaints, needs a “full refresh” of its Wi–Fi infrastructure. Work was started over the summer; however, new access points have been on backorder due to the global chip shortage. While they wait, Bruneau said they pulled old access points from Wofford Hall and installed them around Phelps to help boost the signal.
Despite these efforts, students are still having issues in Phelps Hall.
“Since move-in, I don’t think there has been a day where I had steady internet connection the whole day,” said Karissa Scholten, sophomore social studies education major.
The new access points have, according to Bruneau, arrived in the country and are sitting in a warehouse, ready to be sent. It is possible, Bruneau said, that they may be able to install the new access points over fall break if everything goes smoothly.
Courtyard is a different issue. While the number of access points is adequate to cover the entire building, as each apartment has its own access point, battery backups keeping critical network equipment online through glitches and power outages frequently are drained.
Bruneau said they are currently in the process of replacing those drained batteries, which he hopes will solve the majority of issues.
Many of the Wi–Fi issues throughout campus were laid bare last year during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Carolina. Students, such as Scout Lewis, a junior environmental studies major, said she had to go to the library to submit her work due to the Wi–Fi in her dorm, Phelps Hall, being so unreliable.
These issues were made worse by the IT department on campus missing a network engineer from January 2020 to July 2021.
“The Wi–Fi, as a result, was kinda neglected. And I recognize that,” Bruneau said. “But I had nobody to go fix the things. At one point, we even had to call in a third party … but it’s not the same thing as having somebody whose daily job is to manage and maintain the system.”
Bruneau emphasized that the number one thing students can do to help fix the Wi–Fi is to be as specific as possible in complaints to the IT service desk. Including information like the room number, specific issue and exact time help the staff deal with smaller problems that may not be easy to spot in an overview.
Another issue that affected Winthrop residents, specifically those in Thomson Hall, was the lack of hot water.
The situation was caused by an “issue with a pump on the steam system in Thomson that heats the water,” according to Associate Vice President for Facilities Management James Grigg. A temporary fix was deployed until parts to fix the pump can arrive.
This was not the only water-related issue happening on campus. On Wednesday, Sept. 22, a plumbing leak in The Courtyard led to water coming into suites on the first and second floors. In a third-floor custodial closet, a section of metal pipe “was snapped off between the faucet and the riser pipe inside the wall,” according to Grigg.
“Plumbers will go back and look at all the janitor closet sinks and start replacing the short stem of steel pipe in other faucets as a precaution,” Grigg said.
Finally, a power outage took place in the DiGiorgio Campus Center on Friday, Sept. 10, due to an employee of a contractor working on the new Starbucks accidentally inserting a piece of metal into electrical equipment in the Campus Center. This caused a temporary power outage, and if the employee was not wearing proper protective clothing, it could have also resulted in major injury.
