MANY students in Western Province doing online courses through the Solomon Islands National University (SINU) Distance Flexible Learning (DFL) and the University of South Pacific (USP) have been affected by the unexpected outage of internet services to the provinces.
Since the outage, affected students said they were unable to access their online classes, access their education resources and do online research for their assignments.
Some said delay in fixing the problem means students falling behind in their coursework.
However, other students said they were able to change to other internet service providers in the province to continue accessing their study material, databases and online libraries.
The Western Province, known for its vibrant technological infrastructure, experienced a sudden outrage in internet services since Wednesday last week.
The outage has caused a major setback for students who relied heavily on a stable internet connection to participate in virtual lectures, submit assignments and communicate with their professors and peers.
The stranded students from SNU DFL and USP are now grappling with the consequences of this internet outage.
Meanwhile, a ship that is responsible to work on the undersea cable with some expert engineers are still making their way to Solomon Islands.
It has been reported that it will take a month to fix the undersea cable fault and this means internet services in Western Province, Choiseul Province and Malaita Province provided by Our Telekom and Bemobile will not be restored until the end of June or so.
By ULUTAH GINA
Solomon Star Gizo
