Students climb roof to get Internet service

It is quite the understatement to say several students in the community of River Head in St Thomas are having a daily struggle to connect to the Internet to have classes.

Since the start of the school year, they have already missed countless sessions as they battle connectivity issues.

Even those who use mobile data services are also having challenges due to its limited coverage capability.

Andria McCooty has helplessly watched the students struggle each day.

“Our main problem is Internet for the children. We don’t have any Internet here and they are having a hard time with the online learning because their phones or tablets are not picking up [a connection] properly,” she told The Gleaner.

The concerned guardian said that her grandchild and other students in the area are often forced to mount the roof of her house in an effort to connect to the Internet.

“Sometimes when they are in the middle of their class, it chip out, and they have to be walking up and down to get signal. They even have to go on the housetop or down the road just to get signal to do their work. It is very hard on them and sometimes they are frustrated and they can’t bother,” McCooty pointed out.

The children, she said, have been displaying a keen interest in their studies as occasionally they will get dressed for school and do whatever it takes to attend classes.

However, their determination often grows weary and ends in dejection, both for themselves and for her as their guardian.

“Sometimes I am frustrated, too, because I see them walking up and down and trying them best to connect. There are a lot of children in the community and some don’t do any work from school open because they don’t have the signal,” she said.

Data plans insufficient

Calling for an intervention from local Internet service providers, McCooty noted that many students have subscribed to data plans which they have been unable to make use of as they turn out to be insufficient and unreliable.

She told The Gleaner that the Internet service providers have previously said that it would be unlikely that River Head would be able to get the benefit of wire technology soon because of its remoteness. However, with the pandemic forcing online schooling to continue for more than a year and a half with no clear end date, she believes more urgency is needed in finding a workable solution.

“They said that because there is no signal here. I don’t know what can be done but if anyone can come and look at the area to see if they could put a pole anywhere that we could have a better service, that would be good,” McCooty appealed.

Last Tuesday, Technology Minister Daryl Vaz told Parliament that the Government has developed a three-tier connectivity plan for public schools and some 48 places of safety to meet the demand for Internet service.

He admitted that of the 980 public schools, more than 399 had poor Internet service and 220 are without access for varying reasons, chief among them is the lack of communication infrastructure in the communities where the institutions are located.

He pointed out further that three-quarters of the student population islandwide – estimated to be more than 600,000 students – are impacted by poor quality or no Internet service.

“The harsh reality is that time has caught up with us because of our collective failure to make sustained and strategic investments in the country’s fibre-optic cable infrastructure that would have allowed us to meet the demand of a digitally enabled school system, with or without the coronavirus,” he said.

He explained that under the plan, schools would no longer be allowed to negotiate individually with service providers but would be grouped based on their enrolment and bandwidth requirements with the providers required to create a private data network for each group.

Each group will be connected to the Government’s backbone, over which they will get access to the internet and data services.

“This type of network service gives the Government the ability to share a single source of Internet to the various groups of schools and eliminates the need to manage over 900 individual Internet service contracts, providing instead, for a single Internet service contract for all schools,” he said, adding that this would allow the Government to monitor the performance of each school’s Internet service in real time.

shanna.monteith@gleanerjm.com