The Real Story Behind Sequoyah’s bad WI-FI

Have you ever tried to submit an assignment or do some research on the internet, and the Wi-Fi just does not work? The majority of students at Sequoyah feel the internet has been slow or spotty since the beginning of the year. Finn Gorter ‘28 says, “The Wi-Fi kinda feels like it has no areas where it's particularly strong, sort of spotty all over the place.” It would be hard for a modern school to function without Wi-Fi, given all the tools and resources only on the internet, so these outages are slowing down learning. Since this august, Sequoyah has been plagued with substantial outages and slowdowns. But what’s actually going on? The Barefoot Times went to Zed Kelley, the head of technology at Sequoyah, to find out. 

Kelley explained that each room has an access point, a box that is physically connected to the WI-FI (like a router) that directs students in and around the room when they connect to Wi-Fi. They recently installed new access points in Rooms 1, 4, 24, the Sanctuary, and Ross. They also installed Zoom phones in certain rooms (Zoom phones are telephones that connect via Wi-Fi instead of typical phone lines), which have been draining the access points' power. Kelley and his coworker Julio Daniels, the Technology Support Specialist and AI Engineer,   have recently installed power injectors in some of these rooms, “that plug into these new access points that give them enough power to run as they should.” Kelley and Daniels are aware of all the slowdowns and outages and are working extremely hard to get passed them

All of these changes and new technology take time to install, test, and fix. When you have a school and a church that both need the Wi-Fi, it can be hard to find a time to make those changes. Kelley explained “sometimes we're here at 6 a.m. … we have to find a moment when we can restart things.” Students and teachers alike will probably feel the improvements in rooms with new access points more once all of the wrinkles get ironed out.

Usually, the technology department would do adjustments like this in the summer, but they weren’t able to work properly this year because of all the different initiatives from Sequoyah and the church. Sequoyah has leased the school to various summer programs during the week. The weekends aren’t always available because there’s summer school on Saturday and church on Sunday. Kelley said “So what happens is when you do all these upgrades and these things, you have to let it sit, test it, go around, see what's working. We didn't really get a chance to do that this year, so we've really been behind.

You’ve probably noticed the Wi-Fi dropping when a lot of people all go on it at once. Well, this isn’t just the Wi-Fi being slow; it’s the lag that comes from the access point redirecting you to a router in a different room. Kelley explained, “The access point says, ‘Okay, you need to go somewhere else,’ and it starts to send people elsewhere. And sometimes in those moments we drop connectivity for a little bit.”

But it’s not just that. Kelley acknowledges that “there are different places around campus that are still dead spots, and that just has to do with thick walls, rock... there's just no direct place to get a connection from the Wi-Fi access point.”

Ross is especially concerning because the access point is in a closet. “And we can't put it anywhere outside of it because the church doesn't want us to do anything that's going to be visually, you know, not attractive... We don't have a fix for it yet.” Kelley said.

But what can you do, as a student or teacher, to help the Wi-Fi get better? Kelley has a few suggestions.

1. Report any outages. Sometimes Zed and Julio don’t even know there’s an outage, so make sure to tell them so they can get on it.

2. Turn your phone into airplane mode before putting it in the box. Kelley explains, “we have a big box of phones that sit right over there that are all connecting to this access point,” and those are slowing down the whole school.

3. Don’t stream videos or play games that aren’t school-related, especially if the Wi-Fi has been shaky.“Like I've seen students with huge amounts of data being used at a single time that goes outside of like what that access point [can handle]... make sure that you're not hogging the bandwidth." Kelley said.

It’s important to remember that Kelley and Julio are only two people stretched across two campuses and over 400 students. They aren’t just dealing with Wi-Fi, but all of the technology at Sequoyah. Kelley said that the Wi-Fi is his first priority, but with new routers, no time to work, and around 200 students online at once, “It's actually amazing how complicated Wi-Fi can be.”