Published: September 08, 2008 10:10 am      

Downtown Wi-fi being repaired

By TESA CULLI

tesa.culli@register-news.com

MT. VERNON — Those who have tried to use the Wi-fi hotspot gateway for the downtown area may have noticed a problem in the last couple of weeks — the service hasn’t been there.

“The outage has not, and will not, affect any of our subscriber services that are Wi-fi based or wireless systems,” Mt. Vernon Net owner John Scrivner said. “This is the DMDC hotspot portal only, and we should have it back up again this week.”

The Wi-fi gateway for the district — which encompasses the downtown area of the city — allows visitors downtown to access the Internet to get information for links to the newspaper and an interactive map for businesses and services downtown. For visitors to the area, additional Internet access can be purchased by the day, week or month through the hotspot.

Scrivner, whose company has provided the service, paid for rental for placement of the equipment, electricity and insurance for the equipment for free to the community for the last two years, said the equipment is checked quarterly, and was working fine in June.

Late last week, after hearing the hotspot site was down, a check of the system revealed the Wi-fi for the site was not working.

“We’ve never had to work on it in the past two years,” Scrivner said. “I don’t know the cause yet, but we’ll find out.”

The transmitters for the Wi-fi service was provided by a $10,000 Illinois Main Street grant from Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn, which was paid to Slingshot Wireless for the equipment.

The address for the Web site is:

downtownmtvernon.com.