We are creating this page to effectively communicate the Wi-Fi troubleshooting steps we are taking in as much clarity and as quickly as we can without filling up everyone's inbox with updates. As you know the past three years, we had contracted with a 3rd party vendor to add the additional capacity what we did not realize is that these new access points were not tuned properly (the radio channels nor the power settings of the antennas among other settings) and it was partly because the additions were done during COVID times when the campuses were practically empty. Fine tuning Wi-Fi is an art that requires knowledge of radio frequencies, the building layout, Wi-Fi usage, etc. and just as importantly it is time consuming since it has to be done one access point (AP) at a time (we have over 900 of them at this point).
We have engaged the vendors highest level of support and are concentrating our efforts on couple of buildings by making one change at a time then watching the logs and following up with staff and students in the area. Our initial plan was to troubleshoot two buildings per site which turned out to be unrealistic, so we have concentrated our efforts to CCC and DVC Library building. Thus far, we have received positive feedback from those two locations on changes that were made, we continue to do intensive troubleshooting by reviewing logs and once we are confident that Wi-Fi is optimized as best it can in these two buildings then we can then confidently move to other buildings within the district. Concurrently with the troubleshooting we are also moving ahead with trying to find 3rd party vendor that can help roll out these changes to other buildings in order to speed up the process.
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