And the whole project was accounted for in last year’s operating budget.

“The wiring has already cost more than we expected, but we believe the funding is there to finish the project as planned with all the House common areas and library reading rooms—we’re funded fine for that,” Steen says.

Steen says that he now hopes that the five Houses will be done within “the next few months, probably sooner than that.”

The major constraint is the availability of Network Operations staff, Steen says.

The overall installation process has several steps:

Masters are polled to determine where access is needed, engineers examine the sites to map out optimal transmitter locations and a final plan for installation is eventually signed off on.

Network Operations staff members must then oversee outside contractors as they install the wires linking access points to the network.

This step is the one at which the five Houses are currently caught.

“We can’t just send a team of contractors, we have to send staffers with them: that’s as much a limiting factor as anything,” Steen says. “It’s simply a time issue for what our network staff has had to do.”

That same staff is responsible for overseeing work at construction projects across FAS, and must conform to a schedule determined by these large projects’ pace.

“We have an economical network operation, we can’t do everything at once,” Steen says. “This project is supposed to be done in line with normal work—there’s not funding to hire a lot of people to do it.”

At the same time, these operations teams and the contractors they are supervising are encountering unexpected construction difficulties.

“Installers have run into a number of problems since starting the work,” Steen says. “Every installation involves some new surprises.”

As for the Houses that aren’t yet at the wiring stage, Steen and Coordinator of Residential Computing Kevin S. Davis say the process is moving forward.

Engineers are in the process of surveying Currier and masters in Dudley and Lowell Houses are now reviewing plans detailing the exact future locations of access points, Davis says.