Jesse Ramirez and Savian Moss-Scott. Photo courtesy of Grant Ward.

Throughout the 23-24 school year, SAU Information Technology has reported four Wi-Fi outages, three in the spring semester alone. Every outage can be disruptive to campus.

Associate professor Jim Baumann says the outages have disrupted teaching. “The outages affected my class one day because people couldn’t print off their grade sheets…we basically had to scrap the whole speech day and delay that…we were also supposed to have an interview on Webex that didn’t work out you couldn’t bring anything up on Blackboard because the internet wasn’t working…we’re told and strive to use technology in and out of classes but when it doesn’t work, you’re kind of stuck.”

Marketing and psychology major George Rothbardt says the outages are “more of just an inconvenience thing…

“There have been a few instances where I’ve tried to submit homework, but I wasn’t able to. The professors… they had to extend the dates…”

The outages have also inconvenienced his life outside of classes. “One time it happened when I was on a call with somebody. I couldn’t call back until the internet was restored…I also like to put on music while I’m studying. When the Wi-Fi went out, I couldn’t listen to music or study either since I use the internet for that.”

When asked about the outages after the third one took place on Tuesday, April 16th, Information Technology Director Chris Banfield said, “All outages were out of IT control unfortunately.

“The first outage was a large area outage with our ISP (Internet Service Provider) affecting multiple companies…the second outage…was hardware failure by our ISPs network switch. They needed to repair/replace that equipment which took a while to do.

“This has now been mitigated by setting up our second ISP as a backup…the third outage, April 16th, was due to failed vulnerability patches by Palo Alto to our firewall. These were emergency updates the federal government recommended be installed immediately to prevent cyber attacks.

“Some issues will happen that cannot be preventable such as natural disasters, fiber lines being cut, failed updates by vendors, power outages, etc.…this is why when we have scheduled updates or maintenance they are announced to campus and done during off hours so things can be reverted if an outage were to occur.

“Unfortunately, even with two ISPs, everything must go through the firewall as it protects our network, thus if it goes down, either from hardware or software, the network will not work.”

When asked about the current infrastructure, Chris assured that, “Our infrastructure is continually kept up to date. We work directly with an IT security company called Pro-Circular to ensure the security of our network and to maintain up-to-date infrastructure…Our infrastructure has no signs of being overloaded either. We do yearly pen tests and infrastructure audits to check for these types of issues to continually strive to improve.”

The IT department says it is working to improve the campus’ current internet services and increase the internet speed, with Chris stating, “We are also moving to a one gigabyte per second line with Metronet for the academic internet which will drastically improve upon our current 300 megabyte per second line. We are focusing on getting our server infrastructure to the cloud as well to allow functionality should the campus have major issues.”

The integration of technology on campus is convenient for students and professors alike, but that convenience comes with the risk that such technology could stop working for a few hours. Though another outage could occur again, the IT department says it is hard at work to create a safe and stable environment for everyone on campus while continuing to improve our internet and technology services every day.

Grant Ward is a staff writer for The Buzz.