We are planning to migrate the WiFi in the Medical School (Cookson / Leech / Henry Wellcome) on Monday 23rd March from 7pm onwards.

NOTE: In line with an agreement between the University and the NHS Trust, the new University WiFi access points within the Dental School and Medical School will be configured to support wireless services ONLY on the newer 5GHz radio band (802.11a/n). Support for the older 2.4GHz radio band (802.11b/g/n) will be DISABLED in these areas.

Modern WiFi-enabled devices typically support both radio bands/standards, and should continue to operate as normal. However users of any devices supporting only the older 2.4GHz radio band will not be able to connect in these buildings.

Users should refer to their device documentation to establish if this limitation affects their device.

The IT Service would welcome feedback (positive or negative) on the user experience following implementation of the new WiFi service in Dental and Medical Schools.

The wireless controller upgrades have been proceeding without problems, the final upgrade will be tomorrow morning, so we will continue to migrate more buildings next week.

Sunday 15th March - Merz Court
Monday 16th March - Agriculture
Tuesday 17th March - Dental School
Wednesday 18th March - Kings Gate
Thursday 19th March - Science Central

Migrations will occur during the evening from approx 6:30pm onwards. Outages will only take seconds, the time it takes to reconnect to the new access points.

Software updates to fix issues with the central controllers will be rolled out next week. Three pairs of controllers will be upgraded over three early mornings from 7am Monday – Wednesday. Building affected are as follows,

Monday 9th – Politics, Jesmond Road, Windsor Place, Kensington Terrace, Park Terrace, Robinson Library, Stephenson and Windsor Terrace Halls.

Tuesday 10th – Bedson, Grand Hotel, Herschel, Kings Road Centre and Percy.

Wednesday 11th – Ridley Building 2, St Marys and Wolfson Building.

Outages to wifi should be approximately 15-20 minutes but should be considered at risk during the entire upgrade process. Once the controllers have been upgraded migrations will resume from March 16th.

We will migrate Downing Plaza to the new wireless infrastructure, on an upgraded controller, next Thursday evening (5th March) at approx 6:30pm.

The controllers that need the new software will be upgraded the following week, exact details coming soon.

On Monday we moved Percy Building and Merz Court onto the new wireless Infrastructure. Unfortunately, some users reported problems connecting in Merz Court and so we reverted the changes in that building, restoring the previous Cisco wireless service.

With investigations into an ongoing wireless issue in Science Central Core Building, we suspended all further WiFi migrations until we could establish the underlying cause(s) of these issues.

Subsequent investigations have identified a common root cause for both Science Central Core Building and Merz Court issues. A software upgrade has been applied to one wireless controller and successfully tested using test access points in both locations.

We will migrate Downing Plaza (NUBS) to the upgraded wireless controller w/c March 2nd, and we will closely monitor to ensure no further issues.

The remaining wireless controllers will be upgraded w/c March 9th, and the final 6 campus buildings from this phase will be migrated before the end of March 2015.

We will migrate the remaining halls of residence onto the new wireless controllers during summer 2015.

This week we have migrated Windsor Terrace Halls, Jesmond Road, Windsor Place, St Marys, Kensington Terrace and Park Terrace over to the new wireless infrastructure. Leazes Terrace was omitted due to problems with one of the wireless controllers and will be rescheduled.

Next Monday Percy Building and Merz Court will be migrated in the evening at 8pm, and on Tuesday Agriculture Building and Downing Plaza (NUBS) will be migrated in the evening also at 8pm.

The issues preventing wireless in the Politics Building (Great North Road) from going live were finally fixed on Friday. Since the building only had a single access point we decided to bring wireless online early.

We have shuffled the rest of the schedule a little bringing this phase of the migration to a close a week earlier.

Grand Hotel was also successfully moved to the new infrastructure on Friday as planned.

Ridley Building 2 and Bedson Building have both been moved successfully to the new wireless infrastructure.

Starting Friday and throughout next week we will be moving some of the Student Halls over to the new infrastructure. We are scheduling these moves for 11am each day which is the quietest time for student accommodation.

Friday 13th - Grand Hotel
Monday 16th - Windsor Tce Halls / Jesmond Road / Windsor Place
Tuesday 17th - St Marys
Wednesday 18th - Kensington Tce / Park Tce
Thursday 19th - Leazes Terrace

The wireless location maps have now been updated with locations of the new access points and will be updated as each building is migrated over. See http://connect.ncl.ac.uk/locations2/

Science City (Core) and Stephenson Building have both been moved successfully over to the new wireless infrastruture making 6 buildings so far, see the schedule at http://connect.ncl.ac.uk/download/wifi-schedule-public.pdf for more details.

Bedson has been scheduled to be migrated on Tuesday 10th February at 9pm.

The migration of Wolfson Building wireless was completed successfully
on Friday 30th January.

Ridley Building 2 is confirmed for Monday 9th February at 9pm. Access points will be down for a few minutes while they are migrated.