By Bianca I. Mena
In the beginning of the school year, several teachers walked into their classrooms with the hopes that their lesson plans went according to plan due to the WiFi connection. Teachers such as Mrs. Custodio and Mr. Law rely on the Internet connection to teach students about the format of a film or the science behind computers.
An article published in The Warrior last October reported that “By the end of November, Lane’s wireless network will have been updated with the newest version of wireless configuration…” But the update was not entirely up and running until the end of February.
“I could say everything was done in November,” said Mr. Miceli, Director of Technology. “Everything hardware wise was done but there was a lot of unforeseen complications.”
The reason for the update delay was a “channel conflict” between the Internet network for the LTAC and the rest of the school.
“When you operate inside a building with two different networks, at the same time, it can cause an interference,” Miceli said.
During the WiFi update, several areas of the school had weak Internet connections causing a service disruption.
“This area of the building went down and that area of the building went down,” Miceli said. “You got that working and then this went down.”
On Feb. 28, Miceli sent an email to all Lane teachers thanking them for their cooperation throughout the technology update, and saying that he saw “no foreseeable service disruptions” as of Feb. 27.
“Everything is stabilized now,” Miceli said.
Before the WiFi network was updated, Custodio experienced several difficulties.
“It was kind of a game of ‘Who had a working computer?’,” Custodio said. “Three kids [would be] on one computer because two weren’t working. Now with the updates, that is definitely not an issue. I do not begin class with the mindset ‘I hope all the computers work because they all do.”
Another teacher that has seen the difference in the wireless connection is Mr. Law, a Computer Science teacher.
“The wireless is better,” Law said. “Although there are still disruptions on a small scale, there aren’t any large disruptions.”
Now that the new update has been completed, Miceli said the signal range and speed are better.
Law agrees that the Internet speed is now faster, but it will never live up to everyone’s standards.
“The thing with Internet is that it is never fast enough. Even if we had really fast WiFi, someone would complain and say our WiFi is not fast enough. This [issue] is never ending,” Law said
Despite the update of the WiFi connection, Law has still experienced minor connectivity issues in his classroom.
“We still have [issues on WiFi connection] everyday,” Law said. “At least once a day, I will have maybe one or two computers disconnect. Most of the time, I just need to reboot and [connection] is back up.”
After the rebooting, if the issue is still present, Law has the kids pair up with a partner.
“Usually, by the next period, it’s resolved, it just reconnects itself.”
Law believes that some of the issues that he may be experiencing are not coming from the connection to the WiFi but the laptop/desktop itself.
“A couple of the [Dell computers and laptops], that come from CPS, have batteries on their board that keep an internal clock. And when the battery runs out, your internal clock is up,” Law said. “On a couple of these computers, that battery is dead even though the computers are only two years old. These batteries should last ten [years] not just a couple.”
If the battery on the motherboard that keeps the date and time up to date is dead, then the network won’t let that computer log in because the date and time are different.
Although the Internet speed and quality has improved, Law believes that Lane needs an even better Internet connection.
“Those kind of upgrades have to come from CPS,” Law said. “Hopefully at some point, CPS realizes that a school of 4400, we need a much more robust wireless network,” Law said.
Miceli believes that the Internet now runs at a pretty good speed.
“Where we are right now, in terms of usage aspects, we are actually not even using up the amount of bandwidth that we need to warrant any future update,” Miceli said.
Currently, Lane is one of only two CPS schools to be updated with the latest network.
“The network update is state of the art AC access points,” Miceli said. “There is only two schools in CPS that have this technology.”
Miceli expects the network update to make a noticeable difference for users in the school.
“I think this upgrade will provide better infrastructure for day to day operations,” Miceli said.
