2025-11-30 Maintenance Upgrade Hibuka

At the Hibuka in the French Quarter, we were able to recruit an Erasmus student for our working group for last week.

Many buildings in the quarter currently do not yet have gigabit connections in the rooms. We are using this opportunity to upgrade the local infrastructure.

Wankheimer Täle 1 forms the central uplink of the French Quarter as well as the buildings in Eugenstraße. During the work, there may be temporary internet outages there.

Our team will start on Sunday, 30 November 2025, at around 10 a.m. and will work its way from building to building. Anyone who would like to have a look at our network technology is warmly invited to stop by.
We will update this blog post regularly throughout the day.

Update, Saturday 6 p.m.: We will only start installation work tomorrow at 12 o’clock.

Update Sunday 1 p.m.: we are starting in Wankerheimer Täle 1

Update Sunday 5:20 p.m.: Provenceweg 1 and Landkutschersweg 4+6 are pretty much finished.

There will still be a short outage of the entire buildings when we switch the fiber connection from 1 to 10 gigabit.

Update Sunday 7 p.m.: The switch to 10 gigabit could not take place due to excessive attenuation on the fiber. The outage lasted 1.5 hours, longer than expected, because diagnostics and rollback were necessary.

2025-11-2 Maintenance: Hardware Upgrade Pestalozzistraße 65

On Sunday, November 2, 2025, starting at 4:00 PM, we will replace your network hardware with new equipment. This upgrade will provide you with Gigabit synchronous connectivity directly to your room.

The hardware replacement is expected to take approximately 1.5 hours, from 4:20 PM to 5:50 PM.

Update: We finished our work. If something is not working or you, contact us!

2025-11-2 Maintenance: Hardware Upgrade at Wankheimer Täle 9

On Sunday, November 2, 2025, starting at 4:00 PM, we will replace your network hardware with new equipment. This upgrade will provide you with Gigabit synchronous connectivity directly to your room.

The hardware replacement is expected to take approximately 1.5 hours, from 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM.

Update: We finished our work. If something is not working or you, contact us!

2025-09-14 Maintenance Geissweg

Long awaited – this evening, we are upgrading the Geissweg to Gigabit. During the the work on the switches, the internet there won’t work.

We’ll update this site post as soon as we’re finished.

Update 8:06 PM: Everything back online – now 10x as fast!

2025-08-28 Fruwirthstraße 5

Due to issues with the connections and an unsuccessful remote diagnosis, we will be visiting you today. We’ll take this opportunity to replace the switch with a new one and update our posters.

We are still looking for members from Hohenheim, as we currently only have one member there. If you’d like to join, please get in touch via the contact form.

The downtime due to the switch replacement should last about 45 minutes, and it will only affect Fruwirthstraße 5.

If you have any other issues or questions that can only be resolved on-site, now is the best time to let us know via the contact form while we’re already there.

Update: The maintenance is done, a new switch is installed and you should all be back online.

Network Maintenance Hohenheim 13.6.25

Tomorrow between 8 AM and 4 PM, there may be brief interruptions to your internet connection.

But don’t worry — if everything goes smoothly, the outages will only last a few seconds. In the worst case, you might need to restart your router once.

Why are we doing this? We’re upgrading your internet connection and increasing the capacity of our uplink for the dormitories.

2025-04-04 Hohenheim

After we received the first report about connection problems yesterday at 1:35 PM, we started looking into what could be causing it.

One single report usually doesn’t mean a hardware failure on our side, because that would normally affect entire buildings.
During the night, two more people contacted us, so we were able to do more testing this morning.
From one of them, we couldn’t get any useful info because their hardware is very old, and the third person didn’t reply anymore.

At around 3:00 PM today, something seems to have happened that made the issue worse. Luckily, more people have reached out since then, so we now believe there really is a problem in Hohenheim.

While I’m writing this, we’re running different tests, and we’re getting ready to drive from Tübingen to replace the device if needed.

If your Wi-Fi issues are caused by your own old hardware, you’re welcome to live with it.
Everyone else shouldn’t have any problems – please always contact us right away if you do, so we can fix it.

Around 5:30 PM, replaced an old fiber module in Egilolfstraße just to be sure.
Did some more tests, but no results.
Probably witnessed an outage, but not sure.
Installed hardware for diagnostics.
Will run tests overnight and check again tomorrow.

Update Saturday 6 pm:

The diagnosis took the whole day.
We can confirm the outages on all 13 connections that were reported.
All our devices say they are working fine. The older part we replaced yesterday was probably not the cause, because the problem is still there.
That’s frustrating.
We are getting ready to go on site in Hohenheim tomorrow morning. We will either try to find the problem by checking everything again or replace all the equipment in building 49/51 and the connection to building 53.

Update Sunday 8:30 am: Planned arrival in Hohenheim at 10:30 am.

Update from the car on the way to Tübingen (Sunday 5:00 PM):
We replaced all possible hardware.
Egilolfstraße 49 and 51 now have gigabit internet.
Feel free to try our speed test: https://netz-ak.de/intern-speedtest/

We hope this fixed the problem – even though we couldn’t find the exact cause.

2025-03-21 big changes on core

On March 21, 2025, we will finally install our new MikroTik Cloud Core Router – CCR2216.
All important devices in our network have names. Our new core switch from MikroTik is called “Corey McRotik.”

As the central core switch, it connects all our network segments.

Many people don’t realize that we run a real, independent network.
All student dormitories in Geislingen an der Steige, Hohenheim, Nürtingen, Reutlingen, Albstadt, and Sigmaringen are connected to us in Tübingen and meet here at Fichtenweg 5.
(This is also why we cannot simply add dormitories that are connected via DSL, like those in Rottenburg, to our network.)

During the upgrade, all dormitories will go offline one or multiple times for a short period, depending on how we need to switch the fiber optic connections.

We chose Friday during the semester break to minimize disruptions for students and avoid interfering with the Studierendenwerk.

Our homepage is no longer hosted on a server at Fichtenweg—it is now hosted externally.
The main reason for this change was a series of power outages in our server room, which not only took all dormitories offline but also made our homepage unavailable.
We don’t expect frequent power outages, but with this change, we can provide more reliable updates in case of problems.

In short:

No need to worry, no emails, and please do not report the planned outage on Friday at 6:00 PM—we are aware of it.
We will be in the server room, literally holding cables in our hands.
We will update this message once we are finished.
If you still have problems after restarting at least one router, please contact us immediately via the contact form.
We will stay on-site for a few more hours to fix configuration issues or, if necessary, undo changes to keep the internet downtime as short as possible.

If you are interested in large networks, feel free to contact us (contact form: Mitmachen).
No prior knowledge is needed!
This year, we will replace switches in over 100 buildings—it’s manual work, so every helping hand is welcome.

If technology is not your strength, but you still want to help, we would really appreciate it.
As you can see from this not-so-perfect text, we could also use someone who can write better texts, design announcements, or simply organize tasks.

Right now, we are mainly active in Tübingen, but we already have one person in Hohenheim who recently joined to help on-site.
We really appreciate people outside of Tübingen because you can reach locations faster.

For example, you could help someone in a dorm with router issues, check if a construction crew accidentally cut a fiber optic cable, or look in the basement to see if a power outage is causing a network problem. All of this is much more difficult for our volunteer team in Netz-AK to handle from Tübingen.

6:16 pm update: after 4 minutes of downtime we finished. If anything is different for you, contact us!

Heads-Up: Friday, 06/12/2024 – New switch, new luck! 🚀

Hi everyone,

It’s time! On Friday, December 6, 2024, we’re finally installing the new generation of switches in the dorms on Konrad-Adenauer-Strssße. 🎉

What does this mean for you?
During the installation – about 3 hours – the dorms will be completely offline. No connection, no internet, no streaming, sorry! 🙈

Please don’t contact us during this time or ask how much longer it will take. It’ll take as long as it takes – but we promise to work as fast as we can! 💪

What’s new?
The new MikroTik switches are a test to see if they can replace our old Alcatel devices. Small tests went smoothly, but now it’s time for the real thing. Fingers crossed that everything works as planned! 🤞

Thanks for your patience and understanding – after the update, you’ll be the first to enjoy the new speed! 🖥️⚡

Your volunteers of the Netz-AK 🌐


Update: Saturday, 3:05 am we are back in Fichtenweg and configuring the last minor things. (That were very long three hours 😃 )


Update: Sunday, ~9 pm. we are replacing some modules and hope to connect the dormitories in Konrad-Adenauer-Strasse at 10 Gigabit to Fichtenweg 5.