By Lucas Wimmer

An upgrade in the cable system on campus has been causing problems for people who are watching television in the residence halls.

The upgrade contains new features, including the addition of international programming, 30 new music channels and the addition of a channel for each residence hall. The channels for the individual residence halls will give information on what is happening in that specific hall.

However, these upgrades have caused some issues for students. Some students have experienced missing channels, poor quality reception and channels constantly changing numbers.

Sophomore Anthony Hall, a resident of Wellers Hall, had trouble getting a lot of channels on his television during his first few weeks on campus.

“For the first week, we didn’t have ESPN, TBS, TNT, FX or NBC,” Hall said. “The reception was pretty spotty, too. The channels that we did have were pretty fuzzy.”

He did not contact anyone about the issue. After performing a channel scan a few times over the course of a couple weeks, the missing channels appeared, and the reception became clearer, Hall said.

Jason Howarth, a freshman living in the residence halls, has experienced similar problems with his cable.

“About half of the channels would not show up,” Howarth said.

However, as of Sunday, most of the problems have been fixed, Howarth said.

“The problems have been recently patched,” Howarth said. “I still have some problems getting certain channels, in particular NFL Network, but for the most part, now I have a good majority of the channels.”

Associate Director of Residence Life Terry Tumbarello said it is mainly ResNet that takes care of cable on campus. They are working hard to fix all of the students’ problems as they come in.

“They are doing everything they possibly can to fix all of the issues,” Tumbarello said.

Rajen Patel is the assistant director of residence life’s technology, including ResNet. Patel said the campus has purchased services from a company called Campus Televideo, who designed them a new headend to receive their signal from.

A headend is used to receive and redistribute cable signal to cable television systems.

This headend was out of balance, causing the signal to not be clear in some residences, Patel said.

After attempting to reset the system according to what Campus Televideo suggested, ResNet reset the system as they thought it should be reset Sunday night.

“We have had a lot less issues since then,” Patel said.

The issues students have had with channels moving around and not showing up mainly were due to the addition of new channels.  Patel said new channels are usually added to appease different groups of students on campus.

“We have a large contingent of Illinois students, so we are trying to pull in Rockford and other northern Illinois channels,” Patel said. “We would also like to pull in some of the Milwaukee channels, especially big events like football games. That way, on Sunday more people can stay in the residence halls and get together with their friends to watch different games.”

ResNet has put in more international channels for the growing number of international students.

“We carried the French channel for a while, and we are probably going to bring it back because we have a lot of students from Africa that are actually native French speakers,” Patel said.

In general, roughly 100 trouble tickets were filed out of about 4,000 students living on campus, a relatively normal number for a hall opening, Patel said. However, many students did not contact ResNet with their problems, which led to ResNet resetting the signals, Patel said.

“The reality is, we have so many cable jacks on campus that we are like a city,” Patel said. “But we do not have 50 people working for us like Charter might, we have three. As long as students let us know there is a problem, we get them taken care of as soon as possible.”

In the near future, ResNet will add another new feature to their cable program.

“It’s not a huge lineup [of channels] because we have some concerns about how much data we can push over the network, but you can then tune into some of the channels on your laptop, desktop, in the halls or library, or wherever you are on campus,” Patel said.

This feature should launch in the next couple weeks.