UPDATE 05/01/15: The university sent an email to the student body at 11:10 a.m. reminding students the internet will be down from midnight to 6 a.m. on Saturday.
Students won’t have access to the Internet from midnight to 6 a.m. the Saturday before finals week, the university announced on Tuesday.
On May 2 the university’s Internet service provider, Fibertech, will be conducting mandatory maintenance to its network, according to a MyQ announcement.
Chief Information and Technology officer Fred Tarca said the company has an emergency repair to make in New Haven that will affect the Internet access of local businesses as well as the university.
“There are a considerable amount of businesses in the greater New Haven area that use Fibertech that will also be affected,” he said. “This maintenance is not unique to Quinnipiac.”
Tarca said that in order to make the repair there has to be a splice of a fiber optic cable in the New Haven area.
“This is a fragile situation as of right now and no one is taking it lightly,” he said. “If these repairs aren’t made there is a potential for a colossal failure [of the network].”
Tarca said the severity of the issue is warrants Fibertech’s immediate attention.
“The fact is that if this were to go on and the colossal failure were to happen during exams week for example, we would be much worse off,” Tarca said. “To wait until after classes is not an option, the upside potential proceeds the downside risks if we waited.”
Sophomore Amanda Awley was unaware of these emergency repairs and believes an email should have been sent out to students to help them prepare accordingly.
“[The university] should have sent an email out to explain the situation and warn students just like how they tell us when the shuttles aren’t running,” she said. “They should tell us when the Internet is not working properly as well.”
The announcement said all web-based resources and network related activities, such as Blackboard, Library databases and email access, will be impacted by the maintenance.
“We recognize this is a extremely inopportune time in the semester for this maintenance,” the announcement said. “Unfortunately, the Fibertech work is mandatory and must be completed during this time frame.”
Junior Colton Hoffman said these repairs will be inconvenient for students trying to prepare for finals, but it would be better to fix it now than have it be down during finals week.
“One Saturday night without Internet is not too big of a deal if it leads to our Internet [access] being 100 percent reliable come Monday,” he said.
Freshman Connor Carey is not worried about the emergency maintenance being close to finals.
“It’s a lot more convenient time as compared to if it was during the day,” he said. “I think by that point most people will have called it a night and so Internet access won’t be a huge issue.”
Chief Information Security officer Brian Kelly said that this will not affect smart phones that have their own Internet access and will only affect access to any university provided networks.
Kelly believe students will be okay during the time frame of the repairs.
“Students will be fine and will get through it,” he said. “I am sure some students have had disruptions in their Internet access before so it won’t be anything too unusual.”
Both Tarca and Kelly hope this repair will take less than the time frame that is expected.
“We are hoping that the outage is less than we posted,” Kelly said. “We planned for more than hopefully [Fibertech] needs to make the repair, so we are thinking positively.”
