By ALEXANDRA SMITH
Staff Writer
Students encountered various problems last week when the Internet and cable went out in the dorms, along with college email service for faculty.
Freshman Christi Spence said, “I just get really annoyed with routers because they kick me off the Internet and I have to go to a computer lab to finish my school work.”
John Brooks is the assistant network administrator for Piedmont’s information technology department and has been working on the problem alongside network administrator Steve Dague.
“It’s a latency issue, it’s something we’re working on,” said Brooks.
Latency is a term that refers to the delay in data transfer across networks.
Cable television service was also down in some dorms on campus, but Brooks said that the Internet issues did not spawn from the cable outages, or vice versa.
“It’s not connected to the cable issue,” he said. “They both come from Windstream, but each comes in from two different sources.”
Faculty email was also a problem last week.
“The problem with Outlook was just bad timing,” said Brooks. “Microsoft released an update that basically caused the faculty email software to ‘self-destruct.’ We had to go to each computer to fix it.”
Many students were unable to complete homework assignments or other projects. Some professors were required to push back deadlines because of the outages.
Freshman Frazier Smith said, “The outages are horribly inconvenient to students and professors.”