Second-year Elgin Community College student Jerrick Dictado had an unfortunate situation occur to him that can happen to any student. He had forgotten to finish and turn in his essay that was due before his next class. With this happening around the time of midterms he knew this essay was critical for his grade.

Dictado quickly opened up his laptop and finished the assignment before the deadline hit. Then as he tried to connect to the school’s WiFi, he got a dreaded connectivity error message on his screen.

“The WiFi was not working”, said Dictado, “So I had trouble submitting my essay and I didn’t make the deadline.”

Luckily for Dictado, his professor allowed him to turn in the assignment past the deadline, however not every student might be so lucky.

Throughout the ECC campus, the school provides its students and any visitors with a WiFi connection that they can use to access the internet through their phones, laptops, and other mobile devices. Many students rely on the WiFi to do school work or to access their email. Yet, depending on where you are on the campus and the time of day, that connection may not always be the most stable. The unreliability of the ECC WiFi network has caused some students to complain.

“I think the WiFi kind of sucks to be honest,” said Jose Calderon, a first-year ECC student.

According to ECC Executive Director of Network Operations, Phil Howard, there can be about 1,700 individual devices throughout the campus connected to the network at one time during peak hours of the day. These devices will often be in areas, like the Jobe Lounge, where a high number of people will often be located at once. It can be areas like these that people will struggle to connect to the WiFi. These issues can often keep students, who use the WiFi for school work, from being able to work on their assignments while on campus.

“I spend probably like more than half the day using the WiFi”, said Calderon, “I use it for homework a lot”.

For some students, the WiFi is essential as they may not have internet access in their homes and the ECC WiFi may be the only way they can connect to online services that are required for many classes, such as D2L.

“I want students to understand that we are always working hard to provide students with the best service possible”, said Michael Chahino, Chief Information Officer at ECC.

According to Chahino and Howard, the IT department has recently purchased spectrum analysis software that will allow them to gauge signal strength and interference throughout the campus.

Howard also stated that if a student was to experience some connectivity issues or network problems then the best place to report those issues as of now would be the First Stop, located in the Building A. When reporting an issue a student should be sure to mention things such as the location where the problem was experienced, the time of day, and what kind of device was the issue occurring on. This information would help the IT staff gauge problems and help them fix and improve the network for students.