The Internet connection at Baldwin High School has been re-established, more or less.

With the introduction of new technology, such as the iPads, this year at BHS there have been an increase of Internet connection issues. But the bandwidth has been doubled, and along with other changes,  the Internet connection and access point use have been improved.

For some students though, they are still having connection issues.

“I have had some issues with just connecting to Safari, the Internet in general,” sophomore Alex Carlisle said. “I have noticed, a lot, that the connection has gotten better.”

Even though there have been changes to the system, problems are still emerging.

“The problems I was having were just trying to connect to the Internet and right now I am still having the same issue but it is getting a lot faster than it was before,” Carlisle said.

The technology department, along with administration at BHS, has been working around the clock to address and fix these problems.

“I think overall the Internet connection has been Improved,” BHS principal Rob McKim said. “I think ultimately the students would be able to tell me differently and I haven’t heard any of that. The students are very good about finding ways to get what they need to get done with their work.”

The bandwidth was improved by the school after the beginning of the year to accommodate the iPads on the school network.

“We have doubled it (the bandwidth) from last year. We were at 50 and now we are at 100 but we have never peaked out our bandwidth,” McKim said.

The access point’s strength and “noise” were cut down so they could operate more efficiently.

“We had the company that makes the access points look at them but they said that they weren’t any bad ones,” Director of Technology Steve Hemphill said. “The issues may be more on other network settings; servers, routers, gateways all kinds of different things involved and we are trying to work through each one.”

The access points main problem was that it was too powerful and was addressed by damping it.

“If you were walking down a hallway the access point would pick up the iPad then it was too strong and you would go to a classroom two doors down and it would still be connected to the access point and then you would get a bad signal,” Hemphill said. “So we powered them down so it would cover one room.”

The technology department has also been at work on other issues concerning connectivity. The main issue with that was “Noise.”

“Noise is traffic on the access points. Like with my computer, if I send out a signal it knows the route to the server but with iPads they send out what is called multicast and they just send signals to everybody, so you could see that if everybody is sending signals to everybody it would be noisey like a room where everybody was talking,” Hemphill said. “So what we have done is put the wireless on one side so they are talking to each other and we have put everything that is wired on another network and there is a gateway between that allows information from a wireless to go to a wired device and vise versa.”

All of this is an on going process  that will be dealt with for the rest of the school year and hopefully be fixed.