Confusion and frustration have been the general feelings from students and staff toward the new wireless system for this year. According to Rob Uchtman, the technology specialist for Westside, the problems should be solved.

“Over the last couple of days, in order to fix some of the wireless issues we’ve been having, we broke the school up into 12 separate wireless closets,” Uchtman said.

Apple computers have many functions that require wireless Internet, including searching for printers and locating Apple TVs. Constant “talking” between the computer, the network and all the other devices on the network performs these functions.

“When you have as many as 3,000 devices going at one time, including not just every student computer, but laptops and tablets and everything else students use, it can be too much,” Uchtman said.

The solution was to break down the school into 12 personal virtual local area networks, called VLANs. This means that instead of each device being connected to all 3,000 others, it only is communicating with the 200 or 300 in its VLAN.

“So, [for instance], you need to go to blackboard.com; here’s the information,” Uchtman said. “Now it takes the next request and it continually bounces back and forth taking each request. It was getting overloaded with all the background chatter from all the other devices.”

This issue is what the VLAN system aims to solve, and thus far has been doing its job.

“We’ve already had teachers come up to us and say it’s working for them,” Uchtman said. “Things are starting to work the way there supposed too.”