FAQ

How are internet speeds affected with everyone working from home?

(Nextlink is the internet provider for Clifton ISD and has options for your home as well)

E-learning is now a major component for many schools, and what it will look like for each school level and student will be different. Nextlink understands that district staff and teachers are working to adapt their lesson plans and goals for students to fit into an online, remote educational model for all grades. If parents and/or students express concern about accessing your district’s online content from home, you might want to remind them of the following:

1. Video conferencing and some E-learning activities consumes a large amount of bandwidth. Many times issues are going to occur on the uplink as those speeds are typically much less than the download speed. As such, Nextlink recommends that teachers who are doing video conference based remote learning should ensure that they have a robust internet connection at home or consider teaching from their classroom where there is substantial bandwidth available.

2. Students participating in E-learning activities are consuming a large amount of bandwidth. They will be sharing bandwidth at their house with other users if they are online. Others in the house working, gaming or streaming video such as Netflix are likely going to cause congestion on the overall internet connection or perhaps on the router wifi in the home and possibly will not have a quality connection unless there is adequate bandwidth.

3. An abundance of connected mobile devices in a home will drag down wifi performance. Given that in most households everyone is home right now and that generally all the devices are on, Nextlink is observing some homes with 20+ mbps connections struggling with a poor wifi signal. This is typically caused because most of those devices are actively pinging for email, software and firmware updates. For instance, your laptop may not be in active use but it could be downloading a Microsoft update in the background which is consuming a massive amount of your bandwidth and wifi performance. We recommend during video conferences and E-learning activities that you disconnect as many mobile devices as possible in the house from the wifi router network to ensure optimal performance.