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Plant City Pinpoints Wireless Network Woes

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By RAY REYES | The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 5, 2007

PLANT CITY - Jim Ellis, the city's resident tech guru, says he has figured out why the wireless Internet network in the downtown historical district has shut down intermittently during the past several weeks.

In layman's terms, heavy traffic on the city's wireless network is causing gridlock, shutting down the wireless avenues that lead to residents' computers or wireless handheld devices, said Ellis, the city's administrator for the managed information systems department.

A digital timer for the main antenna at city hall was installed recently, and it is programmed to purge the gridlock by momentarily turning the system off at night and then booting it back up, Ellis said.

In other words, Ellis and his crew are fixing it.

Ellis said city crews will inspect the three other wireless Internet antennas installed downtown to see whether "screws are loose" or those relay points also need digital timers. The antennas are linked, Ellis said, so if one access point goes down, "they all stop working."

"It's just one of them things," Ellis said of the network problems "These are the things we have to live with."

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