Connectivity: Kirkland Upgrading IT System, Wifi Beginning March 23

Residents might experience intermittent interruptions in the city of Kirkland’s information network - websites, phone system and downtown Wifi -- as Technology Department staff upgrade the system beginning March 23.

Most of the work is scheduled for weekends. The city website www.kirklandwa.gov, tourism site www.explorekirkland.com and phone system will experience brief and rolling outages on March 23 between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m.; Friday, March 29, from 6 to 8 p.m. and on Friday, April 6 after 5 p.m.

From Monday, April 8 through Friday, April 19, equipment that provides wireless connections downtown will be replaced and upgraded.

Donna Gaw, the city’s IT network & operations manager, said the work will be a major upgrade of Kirkland’s systems -- and the downtown Wifi should be much faster most of the time.

“We are replacing all of our routers, switches and firewalls,” she said. “We will have some outages. Actual interruptions to the phone system should be very limited.”

Emergency 9-1-1 dispatch services will not be affected, since they are handled by the outside agency NORCOMM.

Although users might be bumped off the downtown Wifi as the system is upgraded, Gaw said that when the upgrade is complete, service should be “faster, quicker, better.”

However, it will still be limited by the number of users on the system at any given time. When a lot of users are on the system, it will be slower than otherwise, a limitation that plagues the current system.