Students at OHS will often be heard scoffing at their portable devices when trying to load a page or video using the Wi-Fi. There is a larger picture to this situation though. Director of Information Technology at the District Office, Mike Halverson said, “Up until the winter break, we had 300Mbps (Megabits per second) download speeds and 300Mbps upload speeds to share district wide. As of Jan. 1  OHS  has 500Mbps download speeds and 500Mbps upload speeds to share district wide.” But what do these numbers mean, and how can we evaluate them? In order to find out, MagNet Staff conducted an experiment and found that if 366 people would watch 720p videos, it would use the allotted 500Mbps.
Halverson said, “At any given time there can be anywhere from 1-10,000 connected devices to the Wi-Fi and/or internet.” Having all the data used on YouTube across 366 devices alone can be problematic. This is rather unlikely, but that is just to put it into perspective of how much the districts bandwidth can handle. People might not all be on YouTube, but many are checking social media. Although students often complain about the Wi-Fi, we have found that it is actually quite good. Students who use the WiFi for social media and video streaming sites are simply using up most of the data, gimping what we do have. This is all strictly bandwidth and does not go into the complications of networking and hundreds of students jumping from one wireless router point to the next.