Oh ResNet, ResNet, where art thou today?

On the first day of online classes for the spring 2022 semester, countless Teams calls dropped midstream as Apogee’s MyResNet wifi disconnected throughout Canyon Creek, University Village and the Residence Halls. Students were left scrambling to get back to class, as the outage took several hours to resolve.

As a Peer Advisor in Residence Hall North, criminology senior Carol Lehavan fielded calls from frantic first-years looking to get reconnected, sending them to the Hall’s lobby and other areas that retained CometNet access during the outage.

“The January outage was inconvenient, considering it was the first day of classes,” Lehavan said. “I know a lot of people exhausted hotspots or went to other buildings on campus just to do their classes, which kind of defeats the purpose of having virtual classes that you do from your room.” shared.”

Beyond just reading her poems, Benaim’s emotional delivery brought her works to life, so much so that her performance felt like a conversation between two friends. From reading poems about using cleaning as a coping mechanism to distract herself to sharing her stories about unrequited love, her performance described the profoundly human emotions that everyone faces at some point but often aren’t sure how to express.

“It felt like, [Benaim] almost knew me in a way, even though we don’t actually know each other,” said Kyle Mizumoto, a mechanical engineering junior.

Benaim is an excellent representation of how poetry and creative writing can help

Connection was restored around 8:11 p.m. that night after a nine hour outage. Matthew Grief, associate vice president for Student Affairs and director of Housing Operations, said that the issue was due to an off-campus equipment malfunction.

“I want to stress that it was not something on campus that was causing the problem. There's an off-campus internet provider—or fiber provider company—called Zayo,” Grief said.

Apogee uses Zayo Group’s fiber optic cables to communicate data quickly and securely to UTD. When their equipment malfunctioned, it took out residential Wi-Fi connections on campus, with no clear timeline for when they would be restored. To ensure students could resume classes in the meantime, Grief reached out to UTD’s Office of Information Technology, which worked with Apogee to create a “temporary internet solution” as described in a Housing email to residents that evening.

“They were able to do the cross connect that evening through a little bit of magic, and they also were able to allow that connection to continue until Zayo restored their network,” Grief said.

UTD transitioned back to Zayo’s fiber connection with only a five-minute break in service just after midnight on Jan. 25. OIT is leaving this failsafe in place to be used for similar situations in the future—at least until a more permanent fix is complete.

“Both of us left that configuration in place after this last incident. So, it will be a relatively quick cut over, but still requires manual intervention. Our engineers must coordinate that activity with their engineers,” said Brian Dourty, associate vice president and chief technology officer at OIT. “Having a second circuit to campus for Apogee,

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Copy Editor Margaret Moore copyeditor@utdmercury.com

Editor Alesandra Bell graphics@utdmercury.com Photo Editor Anna Phengsakmueang photo@utdmercury.com

News Editor Nandika Mansingka news@utdmercury.com

Life & Arts Editor Mia Nguyen life@utdmercury.com

Opinion Editor Fatimah Azeem opinioneditor@ utdmercury.com

Web Editor Trevor Tomer web@utdmercury.com

Contributors

Andre Averion

Danielle Bell

Manya Bondada

Charlie Chang

Jacky Chao

Alexandra Ibarra

Jamie Lin

Thaovy Nguyen

Sihanya Rocha

Casey Rubio

Quinn Sherer Isabelle Villegas

Corrections/ Clarifications

In Volume XLI, No.

9, Arch Nolen was mistakenly referred to with she/her pronouns, rather than they/them.

Bring factual errors or innacuracies to the attention of The Mercury’s staff by emailing editor@ utdmercury.com or calling (972) 8832287 and a correction will be published in this space in a future issue.