At the beginning of the 2017-18 school year, Waynesburg University’s Department of Information Technology Services (ITS) made campus-wide Wi-Fi available for Waynesburg University students and faculty in many areas.

One of the last steps to installing the Wi-Fi is expected to wrap up by the beginning of the Spring semester, and that is the new network infrastructure in the Paul R. Stewart Science Hall.

“Stewart is just one of the last pieces that we have to complete, specifically the first and second floor,” said Joshua Starsick, director of Information Technology services.

Stewart Hall, built over half a century ago, experienced significant renovations that began in 2012. According to Director of Network Security and Systems, Aaron Seymour, the recent overhaul is a factor in why the infrastructure is not complete.

“Some of the timing of this change comes from the fact that Stewart was in the process of a pretty large-scale renovation over the last several years,” Seymour said. “There was some uncertainty about exactly the timing of the different changes that did take place – given some of those constraints, we held off on deploying equipment there until some of the time line had been worked out. So that’s why we ended up focusing on some of the other buildings throughout the campus and then coming back and addressing these last few floors of Stewart.”

Starsick said that, aside from Stewart, there are no other main campus buildings that are currently being worked on. Off-campus locations, such as John F. Wiley stadium, do not have the same infrastructure as the university buildings do. Seymour said that this is because the off-campus sites are not connected to the necessary fiber-optic network.

“Part of the technical distinction there comes down to whether those buildings are currently connected to our campus fiber network,” Seymour said. “Without fiber connectivity to those places, it’s really not possible to deploy the wireless [access points].”

The network infrastructure in Stewart is expected to be completed by January of 2018. According to Seymour, the process is still being planned out.

“We’re really more in kind of the planning stage,” Seymour said.  “At this point, we need to identify locations and where we’re going to place equipment, and that’s going to involve discussions with the departments that are currently located in that space, and all of that has to kind of get worked out before the equipment is going to be put in place.”

Stewart is home to classes in the Science, Nursing and Mathematics departments. Starsick said that the departments in Stewart would appreciate having a wireless connection.

“We are aware that [Wi-Fi] is something that [the departments] would very much like to have,” Starsick said. “The nursing department has reached out to us, but they were also aware that this is the way in which the project was being phased.”

Seymour does not expect any significant difficulties in installing the infrastructure fitted to the first two levels.

“The first and second floors of Stewart are pretty routine compared to most buildings on campus,” Seymour said. “From a technical standpoint, I don’t think they present any special challenges.”

For Seymour, meeting with the departments in Stewart is an important aspect of the network infrastructure.

“The biggest challenges really come from the effort in coordinating the schedules with the departments [in Stewart], so it’s not to impact their operations, classes and things that they are trying to conduct,” Seymour said.

ITS finished a survey of wireless coverage a few years ago, when an independent group provided an estimate of coverage, assuming that the access points were placed in certain locations. They created a map, which gave a projection of how much coverage there should be on campus. Seymour said that the actual coverage was fairly consistent with the estimates.

“That projection is really based on physical impediments, things like that, and those don’t change much at all,” Seymour said. “Even though the survey was done a couple of years ago, the floor plan of [the bottom floors of Stewart] was essentially like that.”

Seymour does not expect to run into any kinks when the network infrastructure is installed on the bottom two floors of Stewart.

“I would say [there probably won’t be any issues,] because, at this point, we have deployed so much of the same type of equipment throughout campus that we essentially have a system down,” Seymour said.