WiFi password change affects school community
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: To demonstrate a student losing internet access Jakyah Overton sits at a school computer that states “You Are Not Connected to the Internet.”
January 15, 2020
On Nov. 4, the password to the WiFi service “CF-Guest” had been changed, affecting students and teachers alike. The abrupt change was recognized by school users almost immediately.
“They changed it while I was updating my phone, the first thing I thought was, “who did this?” senior Paul Hollis said.
But there is more to this change than what meets the eye. At any given point in time, there were over 500 users on the network, which raised issues for the network company. Allegedly, the number of users was slowing down the network for everyone else.
“ENT (Essential Network Technology) discovered over 500 people on the network and the CF-Guest network was meant for just that, guests, It’s never been meant for students, it wasn’t much of an issue last year, ENT never felt the need to cut or change the password,” Head of School Ashley Olson said. “We understand some classrooms rely on that service. We’ll try to develop a network for students to use. I’m trying to contact ENT about that. Of course, it will have restrictions. I know some students were grumpy because they were using the network to get on their Instagrams and their social media, which we don’t want. We don’t want students to be too occupied with their phones. We’ll work on fixing the issues with classrooms, we just want to limit abuse,” Olsen said.
Dr. Louise Losos, director of curriculum and assessment agreed to discuss the conflict further.
We have decided to not include students on the network. The fear is that the number of student devices would overwhelm our access points and make access for all devices, district and personal, an issue.
— Dr. Louise Losos
“ENT will work to create Confluence-B for staff devices (phones, tablets, laptops, watches, etc.) Staff will be allowed up to 2 devices on the network. Additionally, at this point in time, we do not see a need for student access to the network. We will continue to monitor the situation to determine if we need to reconsider this.
ENT is working on getting the permissions, filters, etc. for Confluence-B up and running and plan to have it ready by winter break. If it becomes available before then we will let you know. Once Confluence-B is active we will change the CFGuest password again. This network is reserved for visitors to our buildings that need access,” Losos said.
