Information Resources and Technology has spent the last five years telling students with AT&T service to get rid of it and switch to a different provider.
Not any more.
“AT&T service has always been awful on campus,” Associate Provost for IRT Chuck Ruch said. “We’ve spent years trying to get AT&T to address this problem. Local representatives wanted it fixed, but it took awhile for corporate
to realize that it should be a priority.”
Finally, AT&T installed a cell tower on the radio tower by Jobst Hall this summer, Ruch said.
“They even paid for engineering
studies on the tower to see if it could support the weight of what they needed to add,” he said. “Unfortunately it took an extra four or five months longer than expected to install it. It was supposed
to be finished by March, but it wasn’t really done until August. It was finished before students came back though, thankfully.”
Inadequate AT&T service on campus is an especially big issue because of the amount of students who come to campus with it, Ruch said.
“Virtually all students from Chicago seem to have AT&T, and somewhere between 30 and 35 percent of freshmen have it on top of that,” he said. “That’s a lot of customers for them to lose.”
Reception should be much better
in almost every place on campus
now that the cell tower has been added, Ruch said.
“Just because the tower is here now doesn’t mean there will be coverage everywhere,” he said. “There may or may not be good reception in the Markin [Family Student Recreation Center] basement,
but there will be some supplemental
things added there to make that better. There will probably
be some issues with coverage in most of the basements, really.”
