‘Tech_WiFi’ has been growing in popularity as the unreliable network connection within Worcester Technical High School. In response, students began moving towards the guest wireless network connection which is meant for teachers and staff members. The ISS&N shop is attempting to improve ‘Tech_WiFi’ in order for others to stop relying on the wrong SSID and use ‘Tech_WiFi’ instead.
An ISS&N student explained what an SSID was because it’s something that’s very simple but not often heard by the general public. A student explained that SSID’s are, “the names of the internet connections” and that they have different settings from their security or whether they are broadcast or not.
Mr. Case from the ISS&N shop talked about why ‘’Tech_WiFi’’ was the most affected. The usage of this SSID had expanded very dramatically over the past two years with the huge usage increase of student Chromebooks in the building.
He said, “Keeping the ‘Tech_Wifi’ SSID working reliably has been challenging for all of us working on the network.” This is because ‘Tech_Wifi’ has been providing connections to multiple kinds of devices including iPhones, Android phones, watches, iPads and an interesting assortment of devices like tablets.”
When Mr. Case gets most of the teachers on one connection and they then use a different connection, it makes it more difficult to isolate the issue. It also creates an issue on Chromebook devices because if one student is on a connection and the other is on another one, it causes issues with the connection. He explains that fixing the issue became increasingly harder because people switching to an SSID not made for them causes more variables that are not expected while troubleshooting the stress on the network.
So, we wanted to know just how many people were on the incorrect SSID. Mr. Case brought the statistics on screen and showed us that currently there were around 1766 people using ‘Tech_WiFi’ and over 2500 users in total are connected to an SSID in the school. However, with the SSID ‘admin_wireless’ siphoning users from ‘Tech_WiFi,’ that number was very different during the network’s worst moments. Seeing the different devices using the incorrect SSID was astonishing because it was so large that Mr. Case and ISS&N students can’t just kick thirty or forty of those people off the network.
Mr. Case further explained that some students managed to find other SSID’s to connect to because of a slow connection at one point. However, he said that it’s not that their speed is changing, that either way if users connected to an SSID in the school it’s all going through the same wireless access point that provides the connection. The only difference was that fewer people were relying on it.
The most problematic of these SSID’s that people often migrated to was the ‘Guest Wireless’ network. When a student user got the password to this connection, it became more difficult to manage because more and more students began connecting to the point where it began affecting the teachers and users that the SSID was originally made for, just because students wanted a faster connection. So because of the growing popularity and problematic effects of ‘Guest Wireless,’ the ISS&N shop had to take it down.
With all of these issues, we were intrigued to understand what the solution to this conundrum would be. Would taking down ‘Guest Wireless’ be the finale? Mr. Case said, “There are multiple issues which makes it fun… So far, ‘Teacher Chromebooks’, ‘Chromebooks,’ and ‘Guest Wireless’ is going away. We are helping teachers use ‘admin_wireless’ for their Windows devices.”
This means that the only two SSID’s that will be left is ‘Tech_WiFi’ and ‘admin_wireless’ for students and teachers. However, that is not all. In order to improve the connection of these two SSID’s, the ISS&N shop created a splash screen for when people want to connect to ‘Tech_WiFi.’ This should improve the connections because it prevents most devices from connecting to the network without the owner knowing. This comes in handy as it also makes the device hold on to its IP address given in one side of the building, creating a slow connection. This way, students only have to agree to connect to ‘Tech_WiFi’ a couple of times in the day, so that they always have a fresh connection.
Curious to know if this would actually work, we asked if there was any way of telling if the problem was beginning to go away. He showed us a website that takes the wireless access point in the school and said with confidence: “‘Tech _WiFi’ has been improved”.
Before the interview was over, we wanted to know: Could an event like this ever happen again? He explained that the students in his shop are working hard to prevent that with the ticket system, which has his students go around the school to solve networking issues. However, it will be easier to isolate problems in the system with its current, more efficient state.
Overall, the network is stable but far from perfect. In order to keep the WiFi from being wrecked, we need to make sure that students don’t gather onto the wrong SSID or we won’t be able to tell when a real threat to the server is upon us.