For a student’s academic success, Wi-Fi is the make or break tool that could decide whether someone gets an A- or a B+. It is something students should be able to rely on at school. The Wi-Fi at AITE, however, has worsened since October and has gotten to the point where it interferes with a student’s ability to learn.

AITE’s IT specialist Peter Clarke explained that the Wi-Fi is a complicated situation where a large number of users contribute to the problem. “What messes up the Wi-Fi is the various IP addresses that interfere with the main one for all the personal laptops,” said Clarke. 

Junior Gil Vadel provided the student’s perspective about the Wi-Fi issue. “I think the Wi-Fi can definitely be improved. Sometimes it works fine, but other times it doesn’t work at all,” said Vadel.

Clarke proposed encouraging students to moderate their usage on personal devices to better the school’s Wi-Fi as a whole. Vadel also provided potential solutions to the problem. “I’m not sure what parts of the Wi-Fi are controlled by the school and what parts are controlled by the district,” said Vadel. “So this problem might need to be dealt with on the district level. But maybe it would be beneficial to have separate Wi-Fi routers on each side of the building so that fewer students are on the same network,” said Vadel.

Hopefully solutions will be put in place since Wi-Fi is necessary for student learning, however in the meantime, keeping personal devices like phones off the network can help.