Cellular and wireless services have long been issues on campus, and while problems remain, steps have been taken to improve service.
Particular spots of poor quality or even no service at all on campus have been noted by students.
“Every time I leave campus to go back to my apartment, my service gets noticeably better,” said Moira Anthony, senior broadcast journalism major. “You would think it would be the other way around, right?”
However, two known causes of so-called “dead zones” are hilly terrain and dense foliage, two things Oxford and The University of Mississippi have aplenty.
Dead zones are not uncommon for most cell carriers, but they often seem out of place on a university campus, where students and staff are constantly talking, texting and emailing one another using wireless 3G and 4G data, provided by their phone companies at no small cost.
“Internet access is terrible in Lewis, which is really unfortunate for science majors who have to take a lot of physics classes,” said Olivia Cooper, junior chemical engineering major.
Lewis Hall is notably one of the few campus buildings not indicated as having its own high-speed wireless access, despite the presence of such access in all the surrounding buildings. Other such buildings are the Turner Center, Paul B. Johnson Commons and the Ridge North Residential Hall.
“There’s a particular spot on campus, right near Alumni Drive, where I lose reception completely sometimes. I mean, calls drop, and I can’t even call people back until I drive far enough away,” senior art major Elizabeth Wilson said.
The university’s Wireless Network Access home page notes that some buildings have undergone complete hardware upgrades to extend and improve wireless services, courtesy of the Office of Information Technology, and progress will continue throughout the year.
Despite day-to-day service issues, campus inhabitants now no longer have to worry about poor service on gamedays.
Stealth poles have been installed in the Grove as part of the university’s DAS project, which refers to a Distributed Antenna System contracted by the university with a company called NextG Networks.
A DAS is a vendor-neutral network of antenna nodes that are designed to promote and support high cell bandwidth use and capacity needs within one specific area. Such systems have been installed in airports, shopping centers, cruise ships and sports arenas with great success.
The DAS addresses cellular service but not Wi-Fi, though there is the possibility of further additions to improve Internet capabilities in the future.
As of November 2012, the university’s Department of Facilities Planning reported that DAS covering the Grove, the Circle, Vaught-Hemingway Stadium and the Ford Center is complete and fully functioning.
