Students may soon be getting more bars in more places—places like Edens.
AT&T has announced its collaboration with the Office of Information Technology to increase cell phone coverage on campus. The plan calls for installing additional equipment, increasing the total number of outdoor amplifiers by 50 percent, boosting in-building wireless systems and changing the way AT&T’s signal travels to Duke in order to cut down on interference and decrease the number of dropped calls.
Campus Council and OIT have worked together for the last several years to address student complaints about cell phone coverage.
“The council thought that this would be a wonderful way to address one of the needs and concerns that really gets at the heart of students’ residential experiences,” said Campus Council President Stephen Temple, a junior.
Installing the service-improvement infrastructure will cost more than $1 million, but a significant portion of the expenses will be funded by the cell phone carriers, said Bob Johnson, senior director of communications infrastructure for OIT.
AT&T representative Della Bowling could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
The project stems from a Campus Council and OIT survey—e-mailed to students Sept. 21—that aimed to find areas with the most coverage problems and engineer solutions based on the responses. The objective of the survey is to increase service to the point where landlines can be eliminated, Johnson said.
The survey asked students which cell phone provider they had, where and when on campus students experienced poor reception and on what floor of residence halls this occurred. Based on survey results, AT&T and Verizon Wireless are students’ primary service providers.
Temple said approximately 1,400 students responded to the survey within a span of a few hours. Soon after receiving the survey data, OIT signal testers were sent to East, West and Central Campuses to find options for improving cell phone reception across the three campuses.
Survey results indicated that the worst dead zones are on East Campus, particularly in Bell Tower, in some Central Campus residences and Edens and Craven Quadrangles on West Campus.
Temple said he and OIT officials were surprised that reception on East was a problem because there was a perception that any service issues on the freshman campus had been resolved.
“I think that was good for them to get that feedback and find out that there are troubled areas in residence halls that had not been considered troubled areas in the past,” Temple said.
Most respondents to the survey responded that their phones did not work particularly well “all the time.”
Basements and elevators in science buildings are also dead spots, senior Shannon Beall said.
Johnson said AT&T and Verizon have the best coverage on campus because they were willing to work with Duke to improve reception. Sprint and T-Mobile have not responded to Duke’s attempts to collaborate with them, he added.
Problems with cell phone reception sometimes pose safety concerns, prompting OIT to ask Residence Life and Housing Services to install emergency telephones in certain locations, Johnson said.
Although landlines are available for student use in all dorm rooms if students need to make emergency phone calls, Johnson noted that fewer than 90 landlines out of the thousands available are actually used.
Johnson said he expects testing to be fully complete within the next six months, but improvements may be seen earlier than that.
“It’s a continual process that you have to go through with the carriers,” Johnson said. “We’re finally there, and hopefully we’ll see significant improvement in November.”