By Ethan Walshe
Editor-in-Chief

With the passage of labor day, the school year is now in full swing. As with every school year, a number of changes comes with it. One of the most prominent of these changes that will affect the day-to-day lives of students is the new system for accessing the internet wirelessly.

Over the summer, the school took the time to install a new wifi system throughout the school with the aim of improving the wifi for all students and faculty who would be accessing the internet. With the recent surge of smartphone use, this change has become essential.

“Our goal was to build a wireless network than can be accessed throughout the building without people having to switch through different airports, but also would allow people to connect to the network more easily,” said technology specialist Stephanie Gosselin.

In previous years, students would access the school wide wireless system by simply connecting to a wifi router in any of the designated rooms, e.g. “WA-250.” With this new system in place, students will connect their devices to the network named “WA-S” which can be found throughout all of the school instead of changing networks between different rooms and areas in the building.

The wifi is no longer “open” however. Upon connecting, students must the log in in order to access the internet. This is a simple enough process, as all that is required is the student’s name, year of graduation, and ID number, the former two being components of the username and the latter being the password. The username reads as the following “YOGFirstInitialLastName.” For example “14ewalshe” would be my login.

This login will keep the student connected for the entirety of that day, but upon returning to WA the following day, they will need to reconnect. This differs from the previous set up where the connection was automatic once a student had done it once before.

“What was happening was that every time… [a student] walked into the building, [they’re smartphone] would connect automatically, even though it didn’t need to be connected. Everybody was just connecting…it was just slowing everything down,” said Gosselin.

While this new method of getting online may seem inconvenient for students, that was certainly not the intention of the change.

“We want kids to be able to connect. We want you to be able to use your devices when it’s appropriate at school, but we had to build a network that could manage those devices,” said Gosselin.

There have been no notable problems thus far that were not able to be solved by the school, though this new system has only been in place for two weeks. It is yet to be seen for sure how this new wifi will affect the student body.