As the mountain of research projects, tests, quizzes, labs, and papers piled up before Spring Break, students faced extreme difficulty completing their work while battling against extremely slow internet speeds in school.
“I can’t get anything done that I need. Some people in my German class were waiting ten minutes to get on the internet. They couldn’t complete the assignment,” stated junior Ana Botto, a German II student.
Many other students share Ana’s frustration in their other classes. George Wood, a junior in AP Language and Composition, explains how he finds the internet “…incredibly slow… and extremely bothersome. We had three days to work on an English project in class, and I’ve only had five minutes of class time to get it done.”
Teachers, too, notice that the slow internet speeds hinder their students’ ability to work productively within class time. Mrs. Pham, who teaches freshman and sophomore English, said “the internet has been a challenge this semester… While our school subscribes to wonderful databases that students can use and a fabulous NoodleTools program to help cite their sources, if the internet doesn’t work, those programs won’t either.”
Though the internet speed has aggravated many students and teachers alike, Mr. Breeden, the school’s Technology Integration Specialist, clarified why it is so slow. “Our internet connection is hosted at the district office. From there we have fiber pipes that run to all [four District 155 high schools],” he explained. ”All the traffic goes back [from the schools] to the district office. So you see why there would be a bit of a bottleneck. We’re all sharing the same internet connection. At any given time we can have as many as 1000 people trying to access the web.”
To allow both the teachers and the students to have an equal opportunity at receiving internet connection, the district uses something called internet throttling, or allotting a certain amount of connection for each user. “If the [internet] pipe fills up, then everything shuts down. The internet can’t work at all,” described Mr. Breeden. Ultimately, dividing the bandwidth prevents the pipe from filling up, yet at the same time, results in a slower internet speed for everyone.
However, the set-up of the system is not the only problem. ““Even though we improved internet bandwidth two years ago, the amount of traffic has increased significantly,” said Mr. Breeden. He recollects how the “labs were not always as busy as they are now” and that students “use[d] programs that were on the computers [itself]” in years past. “But as teachers start to develop technology in their lesson plans, the internet is used a lot more,” he states. “The internet offers so much.”
A recent email sent to all of the district staff by George DiVenere, the district’s Director of Technology, indicates that a solution is close at hand.
Many upgrades that will significantly improve the internet connection are being introduced into each of the D155 schools one at a time.
Prairie Ridge’s upgrade is scheduled for the week of April 16 to April 20.
The district office has already installed new equipment for the internet connection, making it such that “each building… will be able to connect directly to the internet as opposed to connecting through a shared connection,” explained Mr. DiVenere.
“More specifically, each building above will have its own 100Mb connection as opposed to the entire district sharing a single 70Mb connection,” he added.
Based on these improvements, faster internet speeds are expected in the near future. So the next time students are bombarded with projects, they hopefully will have more productive time at school, not having to wait and wait for those pages to load.
