Tired of dropped calls within the school walls? The Student Senate subscribed to a solution. On Jan. 18, the Student Activities Board (SAB) approved a proposal for an $11,260 installation service to be performed by Advanced Communication Specialists (ACS), a company that provides subcontract work for residential and commercial clients in structured wiring, networking, security, telephone, central vacuum, entertainment and automation.
Student Senate sent a general survey early last semester in order to query student’s sentiments toward cellular reception within the Truax building. Adrian Holtzman, Vice President of Communication of the Student Senate, took special interest in the project.
“The number one requested thing was parking, but parking is a multimillion dollar project that we can’t do because of construction,” Holtzman said.
Beyond the parking dilemmas that Truax faces, low cellular reception within the Truax building is a common complaint for many of Students, Faculty, Staff, and Visitors, Holtzman said.
“It’s really an emergency issues, because you see what’s goes on in the news these days, God forbid there is ever that type of emergency at Truax; we’d want people to be able to make the call.”
The project started in fall 2012 with the direct attention and support of Igor Steinberg former Chief Information’s Officer at Madison College. Steinberg spoke with various sales representatives for Madison College such as Dan Clammer from CISCO. CISCO distributes equipment such as Wi-Fi access points and telephones. Unfortunately repeaters (interior antennas) were not within their scope or inventory.
Steinberg has since left the position of CIO. “His contract was not renewed. All administrative contracts are renewed every year. We are in the process of recruiting; we’ll be announcing the position within the next couple weeks,” said Charles McDowell, Vice President of Human Resources.
The longer-term plan to addressing the low reception within Truax under investigation by Steinberg has been halted. In his absence the Student Senate was left with no choice but to seek a temporary effective solution. Working closely with Fred Brechlin (Associate Director of Facilities), Keith Cornille (VP of Student Development), Susan Schneider (Associate CIO), and, Mike Stark (Director of Facilities), the Student Senate’s Cellular Hot Spot project is expected to be up and running this spring.
“This is a short term solution basically to get people cell phone service to start working now,” Holtzman said.
In the first week of school, Spring 2013, the Student Senate has drafted a proposal that was passed to circumvent the cellular reception problem. Contacting ACS in regards to installing interior and exterior antenna was the first step in quoting the project.
“They [ACS] are the closest authorized installers for Wilson Electronics in the State. I talked with one other company out of Fox Valley. He said his system would be in the same ballpark [price range]. He wouldn’t do it because we are out of his service area,” Holtzman said.
Wilson Electronics is a company that specializes in commercial technological products such as cell phone signal boosters. The ‘Wide Band Directional Exterior