In today’s society, wireless fidelity, better known as Wi-Fi, is used daily, even in the school environment. Schools across New York City have distributed devices to students in the classroom and at home. Wi-Fi has been adopted worldwide and is used for learning and accessing information on the Internet. It has become a part of everyone’s life and has caused us all to become reliant on technology and Wi-Fi.
But what happens when we are abruptly removed from the internet after becoming so attached to it? Even in our school, students and teachers feel completely disconnected when the Wi-Fi stops working. We at Thomas A. Edison Career and Technical High School take pride in our capability and skills in technology, but when the Wi-Fi stops working, it’s as if the entire school comes to a standstill. When we see the Wi-Fi fail at our technology-orientated school, feelings of irony come about.
“When the school Wi-Fi isn’t working, I’m not able to complete my assignments which leaves them as missing and creates more homework for myself,” student Sonia Singh said.
It even causes immense frustration for teachers when they can’t get their lessons to cooperate due to the issues with the Wi-Fi. When the Wi-Fi goes down the entire Edison community goes down with it, many of our teacher’s lessons are posted online or are projected on Promethean boards. When the Wi-Fi is offline, these devices are rendered useless and prevents learning.
“School Wi-Fi sometimes blocks me from going on websites I need to go on so it stops me from working. It is also very slow at times or not working at all,” said student Andres Grados.
A survey was given to Edison students to determine their feelings about the school’s Wi-Fi. It was discovered that a vast majority of students experience an issue with the school’s Wi-Fi. This begs the question, what causes the problems with the school Wi-Fi? The answer to this question goes further than outdated school equipment and instead digs deeper into a more central issue.
“There are three reasons why the Wi-Fi may go out in the school, it’s either something is getting upgraded, changed, or there is a city-wide outage. All the school systems are interconnected so anytime the Wi-Fi goes out it is beyond our control,” IT Networking teacher Jessie Kalloo stated.
Based on his response, we asked him, “Are there any short-term solutions being implemented to help mitigate the issue when there are Wi-Fi outages?” Kalloo said. “What we do at Edison is that we implement our own custom bridges on the devices so that we don’t always necessarily have to tie ourselves to central management. It’s one of the unique things about our school.”
“Edison is fortunate enough to have our own in-house tech team so that when the Wi-Fi does go down they can try to mitigate the problem as best as they can,” Kalloo continued.
With this new information, we can deduce that the unstable Wi-Fi issues in our school aren’t our fault; it’s the city’s. We are fortunate enough to have advantages, such as our tech team and our custom bridges, compared to other schools that don’t have these privileges. We have it better than a majority of schools in the state when it comes to the stability of our Wi-Fi.
Now that we are aware of who is held responsible for the common Wi-Fi outages in schools the question now remains, what will we do about it? If you have fallen victim to buggy Wi-Fi and feel passionately about resolving this issue, feel free to stand up and make a change.
