Hotspots

PUSD does have a limited supply of hotspots for families in need. Please reach out to your school's principal to see if there is a hotspot available or to be added to a waitlist for future hotspot distribution.

Hotspot FAQs

1.) How do I know if the hotspot will work where I live? The hotspots run on T-Mobile and Sprint cell towers. This is an important tidbit because we live in the mountains and even on Verizon, cell coverage can be spotty outside the main areas of town. If a family has a current hotspot not owned by PUSD and it gets spotty coverage, they are not a good candidate for ours.

2.) How do I know if I have a good signal? Signal dots are key to getting the internet. The 3 dots for signal indicate the signal strength. 2 and 3 dots are Good-Excellent signal strengths and will get the fastest speeds and most reliable internet. If they get 1 dot, they're likely to experience very slow speeds, but enough to get online to do research, access Google Classroom, and turn in assignments online. If the hotspot has 0 signal dots or a red dot, the hotspot has no connection and will not work.

3.) Where do these hotspots work the best? The best coverage is those who live in the city. South of Pioneer Pkwy/89A, East of Williamson Valley Rd, North of Haisley and Copper Basin, and West of Dewey-Humboldt are about the extent of the great coverage areas. This is true with most cell phone carriers in our areas. We are aware of more areas in the quad cities where they do not work, but the list is pretty exhaustive. It would be better to plug in the address to find out the quality of coverage to this site: https://maps.t-mobile.com/ Fair coverage rating is going to be 1 bar on our hotspots.

4.) Why am I getting "XYZ" error? Errors such as DNS, pop-ups requiring admin password to login, page cannot load, etc are related to signal strength. The hotspots have been programmed to automatically connect to a PUSD Chromebook when off-site. They have been optimized to reduce the amount of support needed. Any errors related to getting online almost always can be attributed to poor signal strength.

5.) Can website "abc.xyz" be unblocked? We do not have control of the content that they can/cannot access. The web filter is managed by T-Mobile and not PUSD and follows FCC CIPA compliance guidelines. With our PUSD internet we have the ability to whitelist categories or sites, we do not have this luxury with the hotspot devices. We have made sure that our core services we're offering to students are accessible (ie Google, Zoom, etc).