Wireless connectivity to IllinoisNet has been degraded in the University’s residence halls according to Technology Services at Illinois, formerly known as CITES.

Technology Services has been trying to diagnose the connectivity issues and the root of the problem since Friday; however, connectivity varies greatly from place to place so it has been difficult to pinpoint.

“It varies from location to location so someone could be in a common area of a residence hall and everything’s working fine and then they could go into their room and have issues,” said Brian Mertz, the Chief Communications Officer for Technology Services at Illinois. “We’re still trying to get the full grasp of what’s causing this problem and what’s the root of it; there’s also a lot of people in the residence halls that are not having this problem, it’s not like it’s a complete outage and in some ways, that makes it even more difficult for us to diagnose.”

Mertz noted that the IllinoisNet Start network can provide temporary access before users are required to log in to another network for internet access. It was just rolled out over the summer and was initially supposed to be used solely to configure the laptops, smartphones and tablets before connecting to IllinoisNet, according to Mertz.

Mertz says the connectivity issues, so far as they have seen, are only restricted to the residence halls but Technology Services does not have timetable for fixing when the problem will be fixed.

“We’re still working with staff at the University Housing, the IT staff, to see if issues individuals are having are related to the bigger problem that we’re still trying to get our arms around,” said Mertz.

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