The WPCS Technology Department will be conducting upgrades of our schools’ networks over the next couple weeks. We will do our best to complete these changes without disruption to the regular school day, but some upgrades may need to be done during school hours. We will provide email updates as we determine outage periods.
As part of this upgrade, we are instituting some limits on BYOD traffic to ensure that our network bandwidth is not being saturated during the day by non-educational use. The school system has two ISPs with a generous amount of bandwidth from each, however we have seen a few limited instances where high amounts of video traffic from student devices (mostly smartphones) has started to saturate our network. We will be adding some rules known as Quality of Service that will prioritize traffic from desktops and 1:1 laptops. What this means in practice is that if our network is seeing high levels of traffic, BYOD devices will have reduced speeds and/or be potentially unusable.
In general, because these incidents have been isolated, we don’t expect that most students using BYOD for their educational activities will be affected. However, if students do see an impact, they should temporarily switch to their issued 1:1 laptop which they are required to have. We will not be issuing exemptions to these Quality of Service rules for any non-district devices, because students can use BYOD devices to create a hotspot network, thus bypassing these limitations.
If you have any questions about these upgrades and policy changes, please feel free to contact the Technology Department.
Jordan Wilson
WPCS Technology Department