Lindenwood has been experiencing some technical difficulties with the Wi-Fi on its campus this Fall 2022 semester.

Many students complained about the Wi-Fi not working in their dorms or their houses.

“The Lindenwood IT team ran into several unique, overlapping issues that made troubleshooting and resolution difficult at the beginning of the semester.” Assistant Vice President in Information Technology Joe Zitta said.

The off-campus Wi-Fi issues presented two main problems, the Apple change in their Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) Security settings as the semester began, and Charter/Spectrum infrastructure issues.

The Apple change caused all Apple devices, like laptops, phones, and Apple TVs to no longer be able to connect to the Wi-Fi.

“This issue presented itself most notably by saying “weak security” whenever a user would try to connect their device to the network,” Zitta said.

This issue was fixed later in the semester by Lindenwood IT.

“This unexpected change by Apple was highly impactful and was not resolved until the Lindenwood IT team was able to make a system-wide change to the off-campus residential housing internet that changed the WPA security level to match the newly required levels Apple set,” Zitta said.

The Apple change to their WPA Security settings was not the only issue students living in houses were experiencing.

“The Lindenwood IT team battled several Charter/Spectrum-related infrastructure issues as well at the beginning of the semester,” Zitta said. “The first was aging Charter/Spectrum infrastructure, including downed, broken, or weakened physical cabling.”

The necessary replacements for this issue took a few weeks.

“These replacements necessitated a service call to the individual houses and with staffing shortages facing Charter/Spectrum like many businesses, we saw wait times of 7-10 days at times, just to get a technician out to replace a modem,” Zitta said. “While Lindenwood IT was able to supply Cellular Internet Hotspots to impacted houses, these wait times proved challenging.”

Students off campus were not the only ones experiencing network issues. Students living on campus also had trouble connecting to the Wi-Fi.

“The Lindenwood IT team worked on various localized hardware issues on the wireless system across all residential halls,” Zitta said. “These localized issues included damaged cables, failed network ports, and failed Meraki Access Points.”

The Lindenwood IT team has been working on fixing these issues as soon as they could.

The Meraki Access Points issues were present in two ways. The first one being the internet becoming slow and hard to connect to.

“First, users will report sudden or intermittent slowness of internet connectivity. On the back end, we see this as an AP suddenly dropping from 1 Gbps connectivity to 10Mbps connectivity,” Zitta said. “This is obviously an issue as it suddenly slows all connections of wireless devices connected to the AP experiencing the issue.”

Students then complained that they could connect to the Wi-Fi but had no access to the internet.

“Users will report that although they are connected to the residential hall wireless network, they are no longer able to access the internet,” Zitta said. “This is the most troubling and problematic issue the Lindenwood IT team has been working with this fall term.”

In case of any issues with the Wi-Fi, students should contact the Lindenwood IT team by calling 636-255- 5100, via chat on the Lindenwood website, via email by emailing [email protected], or by stopping by the help desk at the first floor of the LARC.

“The best way to help right now is by reporting Wi-Fi issues as they happen so that IT can pinpoint it and address the issue,” Lindenwood Student Government Vice President Emmie Smuszkiewicz said.

In addition to the issues with the Wi-Fi, some students noticed that the cable TVs were not available on campus anymore.

A survey was run earlier this year which explains why cable TVs got removed.

“The results of the survey showed that over 90% of students living in residential housing watched cable TV one or less times per week on average,” Zitta said.

Lindenwood IT replaced cable TVs with a new streaming platform called Reslife Cinema.

“Over the summer, IT removed all these [cable TVs] as we are starting to transition to a streaming platform known as Reslife Cinema,” Residential Community Coordinator Tristan Benzon said. “Right now we are streaming movies and series and it is updated monthly, we are moving towards adding more channels to this streaming service in the near future to even include live TV/Sports.”

Lindenwood IT is working on fixing every issue to help the students to have the best Lindenwood experience.

“Lindenwood IT treats any service-related issues facing our students with the utmost care and strives to continually improve the student experience,” Zitta said.