Frustrating. Glitchy. Overburdened.

Can you guess what everybody at the SG Collierville Campus is talking about? If you guessed the internet, you’d be right.

Students and faculty alike have all experienced the infamously poor connection to the school Wi-Fi. The internet connects this campus as a whole, through education and entertainment alike. For people whose daily life, assignments and jobs revolve around the speed of the internet, why is it so incredibly slow?

Scott Garmon, Director of Technology, had much to say. Some might know him better as the guy whose office is diagonal from the library. He’s usually the next stop for people with computer troubles when the tech lab is closed. He’s been at St. George’s since 2002, keeping a close eye on technology here and sure it runs smoothly.

“Internet is a broad topic,” says Mr. Garmon, Director of Technology.

For people who don’t know much about this technology, this subject can be difficult to grasp. To give a better understanding, he gives an excellent example by using tubes.

“We’ll say the Memphis campus has a two inch pipe. Germantown has double that and Collierville has a ten inch pipe. The bigger the pipe, the more data down that pipe. We provide a bigger pipe to each campus based on what they need. Each campus also has their own data so that we don’t interfere with each other.”

With all of these systems in place, what’s the hold up?

“Since networking and band-width usage is a very broad discussion in terms of why something works or doesn’t work it’s hard to say,” but our tech wizard boils it down mostly to too many people using the bandwidth.

Bandwidth is defined as the capacity of data transfer of an electronic system. In short, the more bandwidth, the higher speeds, and the more people can use it. Even so, people are overwhelming this system despite Collierville’s data compared to the lower campuses.

For instance, twenty people streaming videos uses up a lot more bandwidth than twenty people surfing the web. Not to mention teachers constantly pushing resources online for their classes.

There doesn’t seem to be a chance of St. George’s reverting back to pencil and paper for the sake of Netflix streaming, so is there a way to increase the band-width? Unfortunately, it’s a very slim chance. If it did miraculously come into play, it sure wouldn’t happen overnight.

In order for that to happen, Mr. Garmon says that St. George’s would have to externally and internally replace their network infrastructure. If the tech-vocab tripped you up, never fear. To sum it up, It’d take a ton of time and a whole lot of money. Though, if the internet ended up coming back to byte us, rest assured, the administration would try to pull enough pull to make it happen.

But, for now, the tech department is trying their best to manage the existing infrastructure the best they can. They’re literally holding this school’s education in the palms of their hands. Imagine doing all your homework with no internet!

Hopefully uncovering this mystery in Collierville will keep you from RAM -ing your head in a wall. Next time you get the spinning wheel of death, think about all the reasons why you might not be connecting. It could be your computer. It could be that someone crashed into your utility pole. But here at the busy campus of St. George’s Collierville, it’s most likely that just way too many $people are connected!