Eman Ghacham/The Cougar

This fall semester UH achieved another milestone with enrolling the highest number of freshmen since 2019.

Students are experiencing new issues due to the growing number of students attending class and visiting study areas on campus. One of these issues is being unable to access steady WiFi.

Students and professors both have experienced interruptions and delays due to the high number of students attempting to join the same website all at once.

“We do have internet issues, but I think this is because of the high volume of students in the class,” said Earth and atmospheric sciences teacher’s assistant Tanzina Akther. “Therefore, when 500 students try to login to the same site, it becomes slow.” 

Sometimes the internet is so bad that students submit their answers but later they find out their submission was never found, said Akther.

Akther also adds that these issues can cause huge problems. As a result, she receives hundreds of emails of worried students’ attempting to get the matter fixed in order for it to not affect their grade, leading to her resolving these issues manually. 

Unfortunately, some students have received bad grades due to the inconsistent internet on campus.

This has caused students to be logged out of assignments or continuously disconnect from online meetings, causing them to miss important information and be marked absent. 

“I cannot do my assignments online because of the lack of internet and sometimes I cannot connect to my online meetings or see Canvas during my classes,” said finance junior Daniela Cruz. “As I was taking an exam, the WiFi suddenly disconnected from my computer and I was unable to continue. I missed ten questions because of this issue.” 

It is evident that the reason for these WiFi issues is the amount of internet traffic that occurs due to the elevated number of students, staff and professors connected and continuously using the internet. 

Many students believe UH should add more WiFi routers around campus in order to improve the quality of their study and class times.

“I think they need to add more signal coverage via additional modems,”  said pre-business freshmen Ali Civelek 

However, some have figured out ways to avoid these instances, even with a high number of students simultaneously connected to the same source of WiFi. 

Students have suggested finding areas that have less traffic and studying in the tech buildings since they are supposed to have better WiFi access.

“The Student Center North sometimes has better internet connection than the library,” Cruz said. “I try to find places with less people as there’s less use of WiFi.” 

Akther informed that the internet issues have slowed down after she advised students to log into the designated assignment website before class starts to avoid making the internet crash.

If students wait till later, when hundreds of other students are also logging in at once there is a higher possibility of difficulty in logging.

Arriving in class at a decent time and logging in immediately will avoid the large number of students logging in at once and will have a higher chance of avoiding this problem.

“It’s quite better now, if the students keep logged in from the beginning of the class, I get less email about internet issues,” Akther said. 

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“Students share discontent with WiFi issues on campus” was originally posted on The Cougar