Students and staff were running into technical difficulties connecting to the college’s Wi-Fi network, DVC-Connect, between March 22 and 23.

A large majority of wireless devices such as laptops and cell phones were unable to establish a functioning internet connection within the network.

Sheila Tuvell, a 20-year-old political science major, and Jamila Hasri, a 21-year-old business major, both said they could not connect since Tuesday.

“She [Hasri] asked the lady at the front [of the library], [and] she said that there’s like only a certain amount of students, I guess that can use it at one time, and then they got to wait until someone gets off,” Tuvell said.

Ben Seaberry, dean of information technology and services, said his department is aware of the issue, and that it is being worked on.

“What is happening right now, is we had to put a limit on the number of connections because it was overwhelming our firewall, which is where all our traffic has to go through between the campus network and the internet in the district office,” Seaberry said. “And we are actually looking at it right now, but really the bottleneck is our firewall.”

DVC staff has encountered technical difficulties processing student applications and records with programs such as Datatel and Matrix. 

The school has decided to temporarily cap the maximum possible connections at a single time from “unlimited” to an unspecified number, Seaberry said.

“We want to make sure they are getting to the network OK,” he said. “Just to try to now deal with this problem, we’ve limited wireless, but we’ll be looking at it some more and hoping we can expand it more.”

Ligia Morcillo of international students admissions said that she was not aware of ever encountering any issues tied to the use of Datatel, despite the program being in use frequently by her office.

Seaberry said, “I expect we’ll know more by the end of the day Friday. Until then, we’re trying. We just got to cap it to just make sure we’re getting other traffic through as well, and we’re working on it.”

He said his department is simply lacking the manpower to devote its entire attention to the matter.

“It just happened. That issue just arose like last week, and so like, we’re just trying to deal with it right now,” Seaberry said. “We don’t have a big staff where we can just say, ok, you two, this is all you’re working on right now; we’re not staffed that way.”

To students currently in need of internet access, Seaberry suggested using one of DVC’s many computer labs, such as the one located in the library.

“It sucks, because I have to take a test, and now it doesn’t even work,” Hasri said, pointing out that the library computers aren’t really an alternative for her due to them constantly being occupied by other students.

“We apologize for the inconvenience, we know this is an important way to connect, we’re working on it,” Seaberry said.

As of March 24, students were able to connect to the wireless internet.