WiFi to be upgraded after complaints

By Gillian Crist
Page Editor

Amarillo College will be upgrading its WiFi across its campuses in response to complaints of connection not being reliable, especially during peak usage times. 

Shane Helper, chief information officer, was tasked with finding the source of these issues. While investigating, it was found that the main issue was the current bandwidth, which caused issues for students on multiple campuses, especially for students on older devices. 

“With the main internet connection getting maxed out during certain times of the day, there is slowness and long wait times to get logged in,” Hepler said. “Once we increase the total bandwidth for the college, this should remove those barriers and or expose new ones that we currently do not know about because of the current main issue.”

The Amarillo East, West and Washington Street campuses will be receiving an increase in the bandwidth to 10 GB. It is currently at two GB. The board of regents approved for $5,000 a month to be spent on the WiFi bill. This money will come from the college’s budget.  “The upgrade that was approved at the board meeting was an upgrade to the bandwidth for the whole college,” Hepler said. “This semester, for many different reasons, the utilization has spiked and is maxing out our current connection which causes slowness issues across the whole college during certain times of the day.”

AC leaders said they feel this is a necessary upgrade to make in order to help encourage a productive learning environment.

“We have really been backed into a corner on this; we have to upgrade,” Interim President Denese Skinner said. “We have maxed out the capacity on the internet that we have now. We can’t push any more data through the hole we have now.”

The WiFi expansion will increase connection speeds, which can allow faster upload and downloads, increased productivity and less downtime. 

“This upgrade should give us enough headroom to allow all of the activity needed for everyone without maxing out the connection and creating that bottleneck that makes everything slower,” Helper explained. The project is still in its early stages of development. There is no set timeline or completion date.