on 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.
on 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.
on In week 3, which is from January 15 to January 21, some maintenance work is scheduled.
The maintenance work starting on Friday will be long and unpleasant for the people in Hohenheim.
The fiber optic lines in Hohenheim to get extended to be used in a different location because of the renovations.
Without the fiber optic line, there will be no internet there.
The work will be carried out by a specialist company and is scheduled to start on Friday morning, which is January 19.
The work will take a long time, so we announce a complete internet outage in all student dormitories in Hohenheim from Friday morning to Saturday noon.
If it’s done faster, please avoid sending us messages all day. It won’t speed things up.
The company will complete their work as quickly as possible, and we will reconnect the fiber optics.
On Thursday, January 18, starting around 5:30 PM, we will finally be able to equip our dormitories in Konrad-Adenauer-Strasse with modern technology.
For the residents, this means they will be able to use gigabit internet in their rooms afterwards.
Since we haven’t been able to implement the exclusive use of routers in Konrad-Adenauer-Strasse due to technical reasons, we will not enforce this immediately but only from the start of the summer semester (April 1, 2024).
We expect the installation to take about 3 hours, meaning you will probably have unrestricted internet access again from 9:00 PM.
There will be a maximum half-hour interruption in internet access at the Schimpf-WG. We had announced this work several times before but could never implement it due to problems accessing our hardware in the neighboring building. We cannot say exactly when this will be, but it will happen some evening between Monday and Thursday.
on The internet at Welfenstrasse 80 is not working right now.
We first heard about this issue on November 11, 2023, after 10 PM, but the information was not very clear at first.
After checking the wireless bridge from a distance and ruling out other possible causes, we hope it’s just a loose mount on the bridge.
But, we are worried that we might need to replace it.
Just to be safe, we are sending a request today for a replacement to StuWe.
All checking and fixing work depends on the weather, because we need to go on the roof to do it.
So, we are hoping for better weather tomorrow to check the hardware in person.
As always, please report right away if something isn’t working. Describe the problem and what kind of tech you are using. We already know how important the internet is, so you don’t need to mention that. Just tick the box if you feel like saying that.
In the morning, it became clear that there would be a long break in the rain, which might allow us to work on the roof in Hohenheim. That’s why we decided to have a meeting during lunch break. One of us, who was professionally near Hohenheim, was able to be on the roof in Egilolfstraße during the conversation and check the antenna there and its alignment.
Originally, we thought that the antennas had reached the end of their life and needed to be completely replaced. Getting new ones would probably have been possible by the end of the week, but in the meantime, the poor internet connection would remain. Therefore, we came up with the idea to dismantle a part of a radio bridge, which was used as a test setup, from another roof and replace it in Hohenheim today. Right after the meeting, we implemented this and around 16:50, we were able to replace the antenna on Welfenstraße, which was responsible for the disturbance. After some driving and a bit of traffic, I am now here dictating this text, which I will have ChatGPT format before I leave for the evening.
We hope that the system is now working again and plan to create redundancy soon. This way, if this pair of antennas fails, it can automatically switch to a better system.
Of course, we would prefer to have a fiber optic connection to you, as we usually do, but that seems difficult.
A new day, a new attempt! Unfortunately, the exchange in Welfenstraße yesterday was not successful. Therefore, we have now placed the antenna that we had removed there on Egilolfstraße and thus swapped everything once.
Currently, there are no new outages to report, and we hope to gain some time to decide on 2 more antenna pairs. These should then be able to function in continuous operation as redundancy for several years.
Once you are in Hohenheim, such an exchange is quickly completed. The travel time alone today was approximately 3 hours.
Now sign of a problem since the exchange, but also no feedback from anyone who lives there.
on We currently think that the radio bridge might have a problem. To check this, we need to go to Hohenheim and climb onto the roof of Egilolfstrasse.
Today at 2:50 PM, we restarted the hardware and are now monitoring the transmission values. We hope the issue is due to the current weather, as the weather and our availability don’t match the necessary work.
Please let us know in the next few days about your experiences with the internet connection so far.