When you’re a student, you try to make your best choices for the future — the right program, the right school and the right investment in yourself. Many of us drain our savings or work part-time jobs just to afford tuition, textbooks, parking, lockers and everything else. We live paycheque to paycheque, but it feels worth it because we expect NAIT, as a polytechnic, to give us the best learning experience possible.
Then imagine this: it’s the first week of the semester, you’re sitting in the cafeteria, and you overhear students saying, “NAIT’s internet sucks.” That’s a hard pill to swallow when you’ve just invested thousands in your education. I experienced it myself. In my CMIS class, which revolves around online programs,Wi-Fi issues prevented me from saving my work properly. I ended up redoing the same task two or three times. At one point, a frustrated student just walked out of class, sat down with a coffee in the cafeteria and decided to catch up on his own. We already know bad Internet is an inconvenience, but that moment made it clear — it’s also a barrier to learning.
At home, Wi-Fi is simple. You get one router, a password and maybe a few devices online. But on campus, it feels like every student has two or three devices connected at once, all fighting for bandwidth. On top of that, the network has to stretch itself across every classroom, lab and study space. I’m not surprised that it lags or disconnects when thousands of us are logged in at the same time.
From my perspective, the system just isn’t keeping up with how students actually learn today. We stream lectures, use cloud storage, collaborate on group projects and rely on apps that demand a steady connection. When the Wi-Fi can’t handle it, students are left feeling stuck, stressed and falling behind.
Dropped connections during quizzes, files not uploading to Brightspace and group presentations freezing in the middle of class aren’t rare. In fact, they’re normal. I’ve seen classmates hotspot from their phones just to submit assignments on time. Others give up on doing work on campus altogether, choosing to finish things at home instead. It’s ironic: NAIT calls itself the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, yet its “technology” sometimes feels like the weakest link.
Some might argue this is just a NAIT problem, but I’ve heard similar stories from friends at the University of Alberta and MacEwan. At U of A, lecture halls with 500 or more students can bring the Wi-Fi down completely. MacEwan students complain about dead zones and random drops, too. The difference is larger universities often have bigger budgets and more IT staff to handle these issues quickly. NAIT seems to often lag in upgrades and fixes.
As a student, I don’t expect perfection. I know campus internet has to handle more traffic than any home network could. But when I can’t save my assignments, submit my work on time or even attend an online lecture without glitches, it feels like NAIT isn’t living up to its own name and reputation. Students are already carrying enough financial stress, heavy course loads and part-time jobs. Fighting with the Wi-Fi shouldn’t be added to that list.
If NAIT truly wants to live up to its own branding and be a leader in technology, it needs to prove it where it matters most: by fixing the basics. Because at the end of the day, the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology should be able to fix its own technology.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the Nugget’s October 2025 print issue. Read it online here.
