Throughout Irvington, students have expressed concerns and complaints regarding the speed and connection of Irvington’s wifi. Students are frequently left frustrated as devices such as phones and laptops are unable to access the network. Irvington senior Akash Mohole stated, “I feel personally wifi needs to get better to accommodate for all the students that we have”. Additionally, as conducted an informal survey of approximately 100 Irvington students, 66.4% of students believed that Irvington wifi was not adequate for everyday use. In addition, 56.1% of students reported that Irvington wifi was slow and unreliable, along with 42.1% of students claiming that the wifi was usable, but not fast.

As of 2017, the Fremont Unified School District has delegated funds to upgrade wifi quality in all schools in the district. By the summer of 2018, Irvington, along with schools such as Mission and Kennedy, is expected to have the new wifi installed and running, ready for the upcoming school year.

Irvington and other schools have decided to implement this upgrade in order to reduce network congestion which is created by the increased number of devices such as cell phones and personal laptops using the bandwidth to its full capacity.

Irvington, specifically, plans to place a wifi router in every room along with five to six routers in every school block in order to optimize connection speed. With this improvement, approximately 40 to 50 users will be connected to 1 access port, making internet speed faster. The slower user to port distribution results in less competition between devices to access the network.

“There will be a ten fold improvement of 1G bandwidth to 10G to reduce the bottleneck,” said Irvington High School Tech Director, Mr. Fung.

According to Irvington High School tech director Henry Fung, the reason that Irvington and other schools have decided to implement this upgrade is to “ reduce network congestion due to the increased number of devices such as cell phones and personal laptops using the bandwidth to its full capacity”. Additionally, Irvington specifically looks to place a wifi router in every room along with 5-6 in every school block in order to optimize connection speed. With this improvement, approximately 40-50 users will be connected to 1 access port, making internet speed faster. Fung stated, “There will be a ten fold improvement of 1G bandwidth to 10G to reduce the bottleneck”

Because of the bottleneck, many users in Irvington were using the same interface, which led to congestion and an overall slow connection speed. Another advantage with the new system is that it contains superior optical fiber cables that are able to carry more data, in comparison to the previously used electrical copper cables.

With regards to funding, the district has received funds from Measure E money, which is to be used to upgrade the wifi in each school within the FUSD. Measure E granted 650 million dollars in funds to Fremont schools in order to upgrade technology and overall school infrastructure.The first school to begin working on the upgrade was Kennedy High School, which was soon followed by Mission and Irvington. As of now, Irvington is still finalizing the wiring of the wifi cables and is working to finish the wiring and switch installation by  winter break. The wifi is projected to be available as of the summer of 2018. According to Fung, “The combination of better wires and more gigabytes of data will result in higher quality wifi and speed for Irvington”.