Students Experience Jetlag on their Wi-Fi causing Distribution to Work
You open your computer, ready to finally get some work done. You type in your assigned animal followed by random numbers and a miscellaneous character. Opening Teams, you click on the assignment and watch as the light gray circle moves clockwise on your screen. You expect it to last less than a second but are surprised when it lasts 5, then 10, and before you know it 5 minutes have passed. Five minutes in which you could have been working towards completing that assignment due at 11:59 pm.
Sound familiar? Slow Wi-Fi is something many students at Fairchild Wheeler have experienced. In fact, when surveyed, 19 out of 20 students claim they have experienced issues with slow Wi-Fi while using our school’s network. That is 95% of the sampled student body. Obviously, the school Wi-Fi is an issue, but why?
In an interview whilst in his office in the Information Technology building, Mr. Johnson talked about “all things Wi-Fi”; Informing us on the general idea of how it works, how our school is set up, and giving us the answers we have been wanting. Mr. Johnson explained Wi-Fi as, “…just transmitting signals, um, that is really the biggest thing of it. Obviously, it is a lot more complicated than that.” So how does our school go about transmitting these signals? He said, “They have it set up in a way where each wireless access point, and you’ll notice them they’re in the ceilings in various parts of the building, they’re supposed to be spaced in a way where they have a certain radius that they’ll cover, so that way they’re supposed to be spaced far enough apart so no matter where you are in the building you should be able to have Wi-Fi access…” Seems like we have a pretty good set up in our school, so why do we constantly experience issues? Mr. Johnson told me, “I think some of it has to do with the bandwidth, just how much the network can support,” explaining that students on a Bridgeport issued device will get priority over a student for example who, “…wants to be on their phone to watch YouTube.”
When addressing rumors that the board still thinks of our building as the “new building” and has been holding off on updating our Wi-Fi, Mr. Johnson said, “I think that’s just people kind of creating their own narratives to a degree. I think the district try to treat everyone as equally as possible.” He also mentioned that he knows that the district’s I.T. department has been facing the negative impacts from the budget cuts and has been “understaffed and under-resourced”. What about VPNs? As a student myself, I am aware that many students download VPNs to try and mitigate their Wi-Fi struggles. Mr. Johnson says,
You should not be downloading them.
When you download a VPN… you’re inviting Trojan horses in and other cyber threats and things like that…I mean, you’re looking at over 30,000 users in the district alone, right, so people have personal information on there…that information has to be protected, so opening up those VPNs, it could potentially cause some issues.” Finally, when asked if he himself has experienced issues with our Wi-Fi, Mr. Johnson just responded, “yes.”
Edited by: Aileen O
