When students move into Morrison residence hall in mid-August, they’ll enjoy faster, stable Wi-Fi.
Over the summer, ITS significantly boosted wireless capacity and coverage on every floor of the 10-story dorm.
With help from contractors, ITS Networking staffers worked all of June and the first few days of July to add 495 wireless access points so that every single dorm room has an access point instead of one per suite.
100% up to date
“In the past, you had one access point in the hallway feeding four rooms and getting the signal through concrete walls, which is almost impossible,” said Reid Bradsher, Manager of ITS Network Deployment. “Now you have an access point in every single room.”
In addition to adding nearly 500 access points, ITS upgraded all the switches in Morrison. Located in the telecom closets, switches are what provide power to access points. ITS pulled out all of the old generation switches and replaced them with new generation switches, which are what give the access points higher network speed.
“So that building is now fully 100% up to date with everything network-related,” Bradsher said.
He estimates that Morrison’s Wi-Fi is now at least 90% better, if not 100%.
In addition to the contractors, staffers at ResNET and the ITS warehouse collaborated on the project.
Continuous improvement
During the last few years, ITS has worked over the summer to improve Wi-Fi at some of the residence halls. All last summer ITS employees tackled Cobb, Ehringhaus and Craige dorms. In 2019, they boosted wireless at Avery, Lewis, Everett and Carmichael residence halls.
This project at Morrison was nothing like the complicated effort of summer 2022. The comparison, Bradsher said, is “apples and oranges.” Supply challenges significantly complicated the work last summer. Also, every building on campus is different and workers can never know what to expect until they enter the building. Last summer, the ITS crew dealt with three different dorms.
Straightforward project
Boosting Morrison Wi-Fi was easier than anticipated and quite straightforward, Bradsher said. Lowe’s, Home Depot and the ITS warehouse had all the necessary equipment readily available for the project. This project involved just one building instead of three and about half the number of access points.
In addition, the ITS staffers were able to do some repurposing. Rooms typically have two or three Ethernet ports, the wired ports that you plug something into. Nowadays, though, students use primarily wireless devices. Big desktop gaming systems that gobble up internet bandwidth are usually the only devices that residents plug into their ethernet ports.
So, the crew was able to take a wired Ethernet port in each room and use it for an access point. That saved pulling new cable to every room from the telecom closets. The cost to do that would have been “astronomical,” Bradsher said, and it would have busted the budget. Instead, the savings enabled the purchase of those new-generation switches.
The Morrison project also was easier because “every access point was right above the cable,” Bradsher said. “There was not a lot of drilling. There wasn’t cutting. It was just a whole different animal compared to last year.”
ITS enlisted an outside vendor to help out. The contractors mostly mounted boxes and then ITS staffers mounted the access points.
Time was of the essence
ITS approached the Morrison project that way because time was of the essence. Timing, in fact, was the only challenge. Workers couldn’t begin until the students had moved out at the end of May.
“While students are there, we can’t get in the rooms and really do anything,” Bradsher said. “So, once they’re out, we have to hit it wide open.”
ITS had about two weeks to finish the second, third and fourth floors before camp attendees would occupy the rooms — and ResNET was counting on providing them with the best Wi-Fi experience.
Shortly after Independence Day, another group of camp participants was going to occupy the fifth, sixth and seventh floors, meaning the workers needed to wrap up and be off those floors.
Busy summer for ITS Networking
During the month of improving the Wi-Fi at Morrison, the ITS crew also juggled other projects. The team sent a few people to Charlotte to help extend the University’s network to Kenan-Flagler Business School’s new location. The ITS staffers also worked on Roper Hall, which is the UNC School of Medicine’s new medical education building, and on the downtown building for Carolina’s innovation hub. In addition, the ITS staffers also performed basic upgrades of access points around campus and regular, everyday troubleshooting.
While Bradsher’s team worked mostly eight-hour shifts on Morrison — unlike much longer shifts and workweeks last summer, the staffers did work some weekends to ensure they could meet their deadlines for all the projects on their plate.
“I can’t speak enough about my group,” Bradsher said. “They’re determined to get the job done. They exceeded expectations. We asked a lot of them last year and again this year.”
“If every building was that easy, it would be a blessing,” he added. “But it’s not. We got very lucky this time around.”