Liberty has always had less than ideal wifi, however recently, the internet has gotten noticeably slower, and at times, fluctuating which made it a divisive issue in recent months. Some students hypothesize that may be because water in the human body is dampening wifi speeds, or because the routers cannot hold enough devices due to low bandwidth.  

These concerned students not only have ideas on how the problem arose, but they also have a lot to say about poor wifi’s impact on their day to day lives at school. Fluctuations in the connection have caused both students and teachers alike to have their routines disrupted by the school’s wifi. Clubs, teacher work plans, and personal projects were all interrupted as the wifi started to fade. 

“The wifi is horrible. It’s hard to contact my parents; I text them back during class and the message doesn’t go through. Then they ask why I didn’t reply,” junior Annabele Le said. 

Wifi becomes a necessity when it comes to contacting loved ones, especially when cell towers are far away. While for others, wifi is helpful when running a competitive club.

“We are not able to work efficiently at robotics programs because our season just started and we need to reinstall the firmware,” senior Vachan Shah, president of robotics, said. 

Not everyone has a personal computer, but for those who do, security issues are a concern as well. 

“Last year one of my friends brought her personal computer and logged into the secured wifi which got her computer hacked. I don’t really trust the school Wi-Fi because of that. Also when the school wifi goes out during class that affects the teachers teaching plans,” sophomore Akash Krishna said. 

Teachers and students alike view the internet as a necessity, especially when all assignments are posted on canvas. Even school projects nowadays are entirely reliant on wifi. 

“The school’s Internet outages are affecting my Deepfake making for AP Government,” senior James Wilson said. 

The premise of this issue may be small, but the problems that arise are big. A number of people became infuriated when the wifi broke their routines.

The news of the complaints has recently reached the district office. Issaquah School District’s head of wireless networks, Jim Woolley, clears the misconceptions from students. 

“Weaknesses (in the network) can be caused by numerous factors, including wireless drivers not being up to date, being too far away from an access point, network issues upstream from the access point, incomplete or incorrect wireless configuration parameters on the client device and operating system changes by Apple, Microsoft, etc in their software updates,” Wooley said. 

The district has several failsafes in place to get everything back and running as fast as possible if one part of the system were to go down. 

“Our Independent professional wireless company has assessed our district wireless deployment as passing in all areas of technology, performance and configuration. Our Technology Department has three dedicated staff members to monitor and address all issues regarding wireless services provided by the district. All wireless and upstream hardware and software are under warranty and maintenance service contracts to ensure quick turnaround for all aspects of our district computer resources,” Wooley said.

The high school curriculum is requiring more people (both students and teachers) to rely on their computers. It makes them feel that it is increasingly more important for the wifi to be reliable. Most students want to be able to focus on work and their daily routines rather than spend class time playing the no-internet dinosaur game.