How are you supporting wireless connectivity for your users during COVID-19?

We have a lot of different types of professionals here in the MetaGeek Community. Some of us are IT professionals at large campuses or communities, some are IT-by-default (you take care of the WiFi because no one else will), and some of you are just trying to get good WiFi at home while you’re trying to homeschool your kids during school closures.

We all have two things in common, though:

  1. We’re all being affected by this pandemic.
  2. We care about having good WiFi for ourselves and our users.

I’ve been reading about how school districts, libraries, and even retail businesses are providing parking lot WiFi for their users. Some schools are even sending home mobile hotspots for students with no WiFi at home but need to learn online. I’m interested to know…

How are you (or your company) keeping WiFi running during this time when WiFi is more important than ever?

Additionally, what help do you need or what questions do you have?

We have hundreds of WiFi people in this community, and I bet one of us can help you!

Basically not doing anything. Campus is closed, doors are secured and only a few people that have card or key access can even be on campus. About 30% of whats “on wifi” are fixed items like displays, TVs and such. Res Halls are only occupied by students with no place to go and all that is 3rd party managed, so not an issue for campus IT. Basically, it’s a good time to push updates for equipment. At the house we have a 1G fiber uplink and plenty of wifi for work/school from home.

@ckelly Fiber at home? You lucky duck! I’m sporting Centurylink DSL at home. :see_no_evil:

Yeah, I figured now probably would be a good time for equipment upgrades since campuses are mostly empty. Do you end up having to go on campus for that type of stuff much, or are you able to do at lot of it from home?

We were on Windstream DSL for a long time, and they were in the process of hanging fiber on the poles here. But another, and local, company got here first with the light pipe. There were some startup issues for the first couple of months during build out but it’s been good since then - almost a year now. And in a city of 2600 people in west Texas no less. Never thought I’d see that.

The good thing about working from home and buildings being 99% empty is being able to load updates and reload switches pretty much during normal hours. The down side of course is that any fail initiates a 20 mile drive to go on-site to fix the screw up.