Illustration by Valerie Salas
By Kyra Peek and Karissa Chittavong
Staff Reporter and Online Editor
Amarillo College students, faculty and staff have said they’ve noticed network connectivity issues since the beginning of the fall 2024 semester, and that the issue has impacted the flow of learning across campuses.
With the number of connections ranging from 10,000 to 60,000 at any given time, Chief Information Officer Shane Hepler said that it can be difficult to juggle all of them to ensure that everyone can do their jobs and school work.
“During the first week or so of classes there have been a few isolated areas that have been soaking up the bandwidth, causing a ripple effect to the whole college,” Hepler said. “This is currently being addressed.”
Some students said they have turned to creating their own solutions to overcome campus connectivity issues. Business Administration major, Angelina Syribouth said that if she did not have a personal hotspot, she would not be able to complete her class work. “I was in English class, and for some reason, when I connected to the student Wi-Fi, it wasn’t connecting to the AC Portal and so I just had to use my hotspot,” Syribouth said.
Some Amarillo College students said the Wi-Fi on campus is their only source of online access to complete assignments. Since Blackboard is the primary platform for accessing class information and submitting work, the Wi-Fi issues have disrupted these activities. Additionally, the connectivity problems have affected the ability to record attendance, leading to delays.
“I feel that these slow internet speeds are not being addressed urgently enough, because with most of our content being online for our classes, it’s quite a big deal and harder to learn,” Hayden Splawn, a graphic design major, said. “Using websites is unbearably slow, which slows my learning speed. It just makes it a lot slower to get to things I need for my classes.”
However, these connectivity issues aren’t exclusive to the Washington Street Campus. The Hereford Campus has also struggled with Wi-Fi over the last year. “I believe living in a rural area such as Hereford contributes to the Wi-Fi issues and slow response times in fixing them,” Brett Vessel, a testing specialist at the Hereford Campus, said. ”We haven’t had an outage yet this semester. However, I feel that the Wi-Fi is slower because our student enrollment is increasing, which is always a great thing.”
According to Syribouth, some places on the Washington Street Campus have better internet connections than others. She said The Underground and some classrooms have more reliable signals than the rest of campus, though even these locations vary in connectivity. “I think it’s just based on which location you’re in, usually on the upper level floors. It’s pretty good. But when you go deeper and deeper, you lose signal,” Syribouth said.
Amarillo College students are not the only ones affected by the campus connectivity issues.
“As you know, Student Media, including video animation and graphic design classes, use up a much larger bandwidth because we were working with intense graphics, videos and animations,” John Brixen, graphic design instructor said. “I know one instructor that had to have students download their assets and instructions on a thumb drive to each individual person’s computer one at a time before the class could begin. That took up 40 minutes of the class time before they could start.”
At the end of the day, Brixen said it is not a Mac versus Windows issue, it’s a network issue. Brixen said that he has had several students request to work from home since files and assets that they needed to work on projects have taken around one to two hours to download.
“Why can graphic design not have the same speed on the internet as esports gaming computers?” Brixen said.
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