As we move into the summer months, the NETS team has been working on plans for our annual wireless improvement projects.

Over the summer we will be deploying approximately 400 – 500 new access points in Residence Halls and Academic / State buildings, which will bring our number of wireless AP’s on campus to over 2500.

We are also investigating / planning the deployment of a wireless assessment tool. This tool will have dedicated sensors monitoring and reporting on user experiences in a handful of residence halls. More importantly, we expect the chosen system will have the ability to support remote sensors to monitor individual rooms or areas that are experiencing issues. We expect to have this system in place before the start of school to establish a baseline and then be able to see the affect of students moving in and beginning to use the wireless network.

The wireless controller issues that plagued the wireless network have been resolved, and our new wireless controller hardware provided by Cisco has continued to perform as expected through the Spring semester. Going into the school year, we will be running a stable version of code that has been well tested in the wireless environment at Miami.

With the technical issues hopefully behind us, our focus will again turn towards the students and improving our methods of communicating with them and working towards ensuring the highest levels of service that they expect. We will once again be holding our Wireless Tent Event the first few weeks of the school year, and after that, we expect to do some outreach into the residence halls that continue to have issues with evening support sessions.

If there are other ideas on how we can further communicate and encourage students to report issues to the Support Desk, please let us know.