Knights Circle announced Saturday night that its internet connection had been down due to a damaged fiber located outside the Orlando area.
After days of residents complaining about having a slow, or no, internet connection, it was announced that “a fiber was cut outside of Orlando” and that repairs were underway, according to a mass text message sent by Knights Circle and shared with Knight News. Knights Circle issued an apologetic statement on its Facebook page shortly after.
“Knights Circle Residents, we are so incredibly sorry for any inconvenience that the Internet has caused you! We were just notified by our internet carrier (Airwaves) that a major fiber has been damaged outside of the Orlando area that is causing an outage to most of their Orlando clients. They did start repairs at 7pm and will hopefully be completed as soon as possible!” the statement said.
According to residents, the internet connection had been out since at least 11 a.m. Saturday and they were frustrated that Knights Circle took so long to give an explanation. General Manager Robert Myers said it’s because he did not receive word about the outage until much later.
“I received word that the internet was down around 6 p.m. on Saturday, though our Service Manager was made aware earlier than this and Airwaves was working on finding out what the issue was,” Myers told Knight News in an e-mail. “Once we got a firm answer to the source of the outage we sent a mass-text immediately. As the problem didn’t originate with Knights Circle, it took longer to get an answer as to the source of the issue.”
Similar complaints about sporadic connection outages have been made throughout the week, when students are studying for final exams.
One resident, Dior King-Aris, a physics major who has been living at Knights Circle for more than a year, said that the poor connection has forced him to work on his three online courses on campus or at a friend’s house.
“Loading pages used to be fine, albeit slow,” King-Aris said. “Videos were impossible.”
It is unclear if the outage is related to other instances throughout the week where residents struggled with accessing the internet. Myers said that he did not receive any reports regarding other such instances.
“We experienced a brief outage in Phase 1 on Friday afternoon when a vendor installing some security cameras in an attic, broke a sprinkler pipe and inadvertently flooded the maintenance closet where the breakers for the building’s power were stored,” Myers said. “It took us about an hour or so to get word out to let everyone know. We didn’t have any reports that connections were slow or intermittent.”
Throughout the semester, there have been complaints about slow download speeds from Airwaves Networks, Knight Circle’s internet provider for almost five years and recently replaced Bright House for its cable services. A petition has been circulating through Change.org since August, which demands that Knights Circle and its owner, Access Campus Housing, “improve its internet speeds to meet student need.” The petition has since reached 633 signatures.
