Since coming back from the second snow storm of the 2014 spring semester, Georgia State students have had problems using and connecting to the CatChat Wi-Fi networks on campus.
“In my statistics class last Wednesday no one could log on to MyStatlab to complete our assignments,” Alecia Tyler, a Junior math major, said. “Because CatChat wasn’t allowing us to log in, our teacher had to change all of her plans for class that day.”
More students encountered problems on Friday in the University Center last week.
According to sophomore journalism major Sam Gordon, he and his friends were having trouble finishing up a project in the Panther Place Lounge because of their phone’s limited connectivity.
“It was really strange,” Gordon said. “Five of us were working on a project for our film class and we needed to use our iPhones online to complete the tasks. Every time we signed in to CatChat, we would be disconnected after about fifteen seconds. Strangely enough, Adrea, the one person who has an Android, was having no problems connecting to the network.”
According to Keith Campbell, Georgia State’s Technology Engineering Supervisor, last week was problematic for the University’s IT department.
“Thursday was the worst day of the week,” Campbell said. “Starting at 9 a.m. there was a five hour window where no one was able to connect to CatChat. Early that morning, one of our authentication servers locked up and we had to shut the whole network down to fix the problem.”
Campbell says that IT representatives are fully aware of the imperfections of CatChat. Over the past year, the department has been replacing the entire system with entirely new vendors.
“We have no plans to make any more drastic changes to the network after the the past year’s overhaul,” Campbell said. “We have increased the number of monitors on staff and we respond to student’s connectivity issues as they are reported to us.”
Students can find information about the network, including any updates at status.gsu.edu.
