ROI: staying below next cost threshold

With 1500 student devices regularly accessing the internet, Hollister's 250Mbps link was often congested and the slowdown was causing disruption in the classroom.

Teachers were struggling to use video, and with online testing coming soon, the district was worried.

By removing the need for a bandwidth upgrade, Chase Raymond enables investment in student devices.

Chase-Raymond invested in 300 iPads in order to launch a 1:1 scheme across its three schools, but with school traffic already causing frequent congestion on their 50Mbps connection, they feared any further rise in demand would quickly render the devices unusable.

Caching performance that grows as you grow

Having more than twice the number of devices to students, Keokuk's 1:1 scheme was seeing huge increases in connections from all corners of the district, as well as giant leaps in media-rich content access - both likely to push beyond their 500Mbps bandwidth capabilities.

But with CACHEBOX in place, a bandwidth upgrade is the last thing on their mind. Despite the traffic increase nobody complains of slow service. That's because up to 50% of content is served from cache, and on average, it's 10x faster than from the web - with some sites as much as 100x faster.

Gilmer eliminates software updates congestion by deploying a cache that handles all vendor's files

Gilmer's 1:1 scheme means that up to 2400 devices access the network many times a day. Those devices too often hinder access to the web-based learning material by saturating the available bandwidth with system updates. This congestion makes learning content too slow to arrive - causing problems in the classroom.

Significant annual savings with CACHEBOX

Implementing 1:1 was likely to saturate their network but a doubling of capacity would cost a further $7000 a year.

But CACHEBOX - recommended by neighbouring school Webb City - handles new levels of peak traffic, including demand for YouTube for significantly less. A one-off cost of $7k would save them $28k over 5 years, as well as postpone infrastructure upgrades.

McGregor reduces congestion, makes content faster and avoids updating its filter.

In 2017, McGregor students benefited from a very high 'per student' ratio of 721kbps - 7 times the FCC recommendation. But with increasing numbers of iPads and iMacs in daily use, and high demand for video, the network was constantly under pressure. Combined with the sheer number and size of iOS updates regularly demanded from each device, congestion was impacting the classroom.

Super BHR - constant 80%+ on a high capacity connection

Delano, an award-winning school in California, seeks the ideal learning environment for its students, particularly its in-class e-learning user experience. That's why it pays over $10,000 per month for 1Gbps bandwidth - enough to secure 236kbps per student and a responsive service.

However, the FCC has projected its 2018 need will reach 5Gbps - a significant upgrade that will require substantial additional budget. But, having experienced caching in a former role, Delano's Director of IT chose CACHEBOX to free up capacity instead, future-proofing the network.

Pyramid Lake Schools, NV

Despite its rural location and small admission of 72 students, Pyramid Lake - a public tribal school - has prioritized web access for its students. To ensure capacity for future BYOD access, it upgraded to a 100Mbps connection - but at an expensive $4482 per month.

But even before BYOD launched, the districts connection was routinely congested. Despite a 'per student' capacity of 1,388kbps - 13 times higher than the target set by the FCC - slow, unreliable web access was getting in the way of learning.

High costs for rural bandwidth limiting learning? Let a cache take the strain.

For Clarksville Independent, its rural Texas location means bandwidth comes at a high price. Already paying more than $3k every month for 100Mbps, even a small increment will impact precious learning budget.

Caching offloads the bandwidth-hungry content today's devices demand

In suburban Queens, New York, The Mary Louis Academy is committed to providing its technology-savvy students with the best learning experience available. But, in the classroom, teachers were complaining - web access was slow, and video-buffering was a constant problem.

CACHEBOX caches everything a school needs

A growing private school district in suburban Des Moines, Iowa, DMSC handles traffic for up to 1200 users, all accessing the internet using a variety of devices - from Mac Airs and iPads, to Chromebooks to Windows PCs, as well as BYOD.

Despite having increased bandwidth from 75Mbps to 155Mbps, Information Technology Manager Jeremy Mead knew that the sheer number of devices in use could still rapidly congest the network the moment they needed to update operating software.

Only CACHEBOX can cache everything a school needs

Franklin already spends $1700+ each month for 300Mbps web access - any higher and the cost would impact other school priorities. Yet the addition of more user devices was squeezing capacity beyond its limits.

When more devices are added it's not just learning traffic that grows. Each device regularly downloads sizeable files to stay up-to-date, often consuming huge chunks of bandwidth throughout the school day - severely limiting access for others.

Arkadelphia deploys caching to work within state bandwidth contract limits

Arkadelphia School District is a public schools district in rural Arkansas, with 5 schools that access the internet daily. Over 2000 devices rely on a 500Mbps bandwidth allocation provided via a state-controlled contract. However, when whole classes simultaneously accessed content in the classroom, the resulting spikes in traffic quickly caused congestion, jeopardizing learning every day.

Caching enables more devices to connect at TAFT

With web demand growing, Taft Independent upgraded bandwidth in 2017 to ensure adequate connectivity. However, at certain times of the day - even with just 100 users accessing the web - the internet seemed slow and unresponsive.

In upgrading from 50Mbps to 200Mbps, Taft expected their popular content from YouTube and KhanAcademy, to be much faster in the classroom. Instead, they found the network frequently congested.

Southwest Barry

Southwest Barry Community School District R5 pays $3000 per month for its 80Mbps internet connection. That's $37.50 per Mbps to provide 100Kbps per student.

In addition to being poor value for money, the capacity available is nowhere near what the school requires at peak times.

Real peak demand has been revealed by deploying CACHEBOX: requests for 275Mpbs of data have been reported during peak times with CACHEBOX serving 195Mbps in addition to the 80Mbps from the district's connection.

With caching at Technology Centre Du Page, annual bandwidth upgrades are a thing of the past

Technology Center of Du Page in Addison, Illinois, is a technical school with a 100Mbps connection and approximately 1000 network users, just meeting SETDA's 2016 target of 100Kbps per student. CACHEBOX doubles the effective capacity compared to the internet connection alone, enabling 200Kbps per student at half the cost per Mbps.

With caching the district has avoided disruptive, unsustainable annual bandwidth upgrades.

Big Horn offloads big files for big savings

Like many rural districts, Big Horn Co School District 3 in Wyoming pays a high price for bandwidth: $3,275 per month for a 200Mbps internet connection.

Since the district deployed caching in 2017, their virtual capacity has quadrupled allowing them to benefit from up to 800 Mbps of capacity at a quarter of the price per Mbps.

Southeast Webster offloads software updates for trouble-free online testing

With a device ratio of two to every student, SouthEast Webster Grand USD was experiencing high levels of traffic demand problem that resulted in congestion, impacting lessons and raising concerns over reliability during state testing season.

But with CACHEBOX deployed speed and reliability was secured. By offloading bandwidth-intensive software updates for the district’s many devices, much of the district’s capacity is reclaimed. Now testing season flies by without a hitch.

Caching optimizes core content at Orient-Macksburg

Orient-Macksburg wanted to expand web-based learning but as internet demand grew, so did network congestion - resulting in slow, unresponsive classroom access.

With a bandwidth upgrade impossible, the district turned to CACHEBOX. By meeting demand from local cache, students enjoy lightning fast LAN response times, and speed increases of up to 36 times faster!

Alcorn lifts block on internet usage during state test season

Whenever state testing time arrived at Alcorn, it would instruct all other web users to disconnect, hoping to ensure fast enough access for fair student assessment. So the district upgraded bandwidth - from 100Mbps to 250Mbps. However, as online testing continued to expand across Mississippi, and more classes and users accessed the platforms, access speed still suffered.

Ronan removes network manager's slow-content headache with a hands-off caching appliance

In rural Montana, bandwidth often comes at a high price. Ronan pays over $1000 for a 200Mbps connection to cater for its 1400 students at 2 campuses. But as web-based learning and device numbers have grown, so has traffic from the classroom. With whole classes accessing the same content at the same time, demand regularly spikes way above capacity. Requests quickly back up, leaving students and teachers with such a slow user experience learning and student engagement is put at risk.

Browning School District gets faster web access for less $ per Mbps

Browning Schools in rural Montana spends $3750 per month for a 550 Mbps connection to share between 2200 students at 10 sites.

With up to 800 devices connecting to the internet simultaneously, peak demand would outstrip the available bandwidth. The district needed 1.3Gbps at peak times, and with big operating system updates from Microsoft and Apple consuming bandwidth, access to e-Learning and video content was slow.

How much of your internet bandwidth remains after software updates?

Claremont Unified, a large district in California with 7,000 students, relies on its 1Gbps internet pipeline to serve its growing BYOD scheme, as well as 2,300 district-owned devices.

However, expanding BYOD across its 10 sites and adding more iPads has caused a dramatic slowdown in web access. Software updates from Apple has accounted for far more traffic than expected - regularly more than 50% of all data downloaded - counteracting the drive for more 1:1 learning.

Caching delivers, whether it's bandwidth rich or not

El Dorado Springs deployed CACHEBOX in 2016 to postpone upgrading its 60Mbps connection while student numbers were growing.

Once admissions grew, the district upgraded its internet connection and, with 250Mbps now available, it expected the benefits of caching to diminish. Instead, caching is more important than ever, helping the district to keep pace with rapid growth in student and laptop/tablet numbers, ensuring speedy content deliver in class.

900Mbps in classrooms with 100Mbps connection

If Fredericktown Local in rural Ohio was to achieve the FCC’s 'per student' target of 100kbps, it faced a big leap in bandwidth costs. The district was already paying $2,600 for 100Mbps - around 85Kbps per student.

But Fredericktown learned that CACHEBOX could not only remove the need for a costly bandwidth upgrade, but also increase the speed of content in the classroom.

East Peoria deploys caching for 1:1 that works

When East Peoria decided to increase student device numbers and introduce e-Learning across more of its core curricula, it was concerned that its 300Mbps internet connection might be insufficient.

The tech team were right to expect problems. Having fully implemented 1:1 they quickly found that when whole classes of students armed with individual devices accessed the same web-based material - at the same time - the instant spike in concurrent demand would saturate the network. And, with increased device numbers, more software updates were being autonomously requested. Files often so large they would hog the bandwidth, trickling down the internet all day - slowing down all other traffic.

Offloading low-urgency web traffic protects Snyder's capacity

Snyder Independent School District has a 1Gbps connection at its High School with smaller schools connecting to it via high-speed WAN links. The district doesn't come close to saturating its internet link, typically consuming 350Mbps bandwidth at peak times.

Despite having excess capacity, the district understood that content could be served to classrooms significantly faster with caching. It deployed a CACHEBOX420 at the high school and quickly saw just how much faster. Content from domains that would previously have been delivered at 1Mbps are now reaching over 100Mbps.

Caching liberates YouTube and Hannibal SD's C2 E-rate budget

As Hannibal SD expanded e-learning across its 8 schools, it quickly found its network congested. With multiple users accessing bandwidth-heavy content such as video, and learning content arriving from particularly slow servers upstream, traffic would simply clog their internet link, resulting in a slow, often unusable service.

With bandwidth maxed out, video would simply not load, apps wouldn't work, content would take forever to appear. With so many complaints, the district was forced to ban YouTube altogether, even though teachers were keen to use it.

Brookfield lays the ground for enhanced e-Learning

Brookfield Christian School in Milwaukee incorporates pre-school, kindergarten, elementary and middle school provision for 265 students. In addition to a dedicated computer lab for their technology classes, the school has a mix of around 75 Chromebooks, Windows laptops, iPads and Apple TVs to enhance the overall digital learning experience.

Content in full flow at Black River Falls

The School District of Black River Falls in Wisconsin has a 300Mbps connection shared across its two Elementary Schools, Middle School and High School, which is essential for delivering its 1:1 e-Learning program.

Internet speeds flying at Airport

Airport Community School District in Michigan had a healthy 1Gbps Internet connection. Yet the connection speed to their six buildings was proving too slow for their 700+ concurrent users, which was causing YouTube videos to buffer. With more devices being added all the time, they turned to web caching to free up bandwidth and increase their Internet speeds.

Double-speed Internet for growing school network

At Brandon School District, bandwidth was being eaten up by more and more network devices downloading software updates. Their options? Buy more bandwidth. Or use a cache to get more from what they already had.

The school had 3,000 or so devices registered to their network, with up to 800 connecting simultaneously at peak times. Big system updates from Microsoft and Apple were consuming bandwidth, resulting in slow access to e-Learning and video content. With 10-15% more network devices expected in the coming years, the situation was likely to get worse.

Trinity School slashes peaks

CACHEBOX is delivering up to 350Mbps of content to students whilst the school's internet connection is only provides 50Mbps. Without CACHEBOX, 6 out of 7 requests would be queued before delivery making them slow. Some requests would have taken so long that the requester would have received a 'timeout' response rather than the content.

Laurens County speeds up education content

The data from Laurens County in South Carolina illustrates the order of magnitude of speed at which a cache can serve up content quicker than the Internet. It also shows that, even in upgrading to multi-Gigabit links, schools cannot accelerate content that is inherently slow at the server source or is delayed by latency.

When Laurens decided to roll out 1:1 learning to each of its 10 schools it chose to upgrade bandwidth to 1Gbps to ensure capacity. That equated to 175kbps per student, nearly double the FCC target. However, in daily use, they still found content was too slow in the classroom. One particular favourite - CoolMath - was just not responsive enough.

North Ottawa

At North Ottawa County USD 239 web requests are typically twice as fast and as much as 14x faster from CACHEBOX than from the internet.

With 69% of web traffic served from CACHEBOX, the school could use an internet connection half the size. This would save up to $9,000 per year, freeing technology budget for student devices and content.

Sioux Central eliminates start-of-lesson peaks

Sioux Central CSD suffered painfully slow web-browsing: students trying to download the same video at the start of a lesson needed to wait for several minutes before being able to watch a single minute.

Before CACHEBOX - its 35 Mbps internet connection was saturated for much of the school day.

Dade County speeds up learning platform

Results at Miami-Dade, Florida show how caching can help provide equitable access to accelerated e-learning in remote schools. Because of its huge geographic span, 220 of the district's schools are remote with small Internet connections. Students experienced very slow access to the online learning platform, waiting as long as 30 seconds for a page to load. Lost learning time was rapidly reaching many minutes in just a single lesson due to the constant traffic congestion and latency.

Oak Grove cuts bandwidth requirement

A 40% Byte Hit Ratio (BHR - the ratio of internet requests that were duplicates and could therefore be served by CACHEBOX) in May 2017 meant that only 356GB of 592GB content accessed within the school came from the internet.

Durant can balance bandwidth and caching to deal with huge traffic spikes

Like many schools, the amount of bandwidth that Durant needs during peak demand is many times higher than it needs most of the time. However, Durant's situation is worse than most and, due to its rural location, the cost of bandwidth is extremely high.

The school has 85Mbps and needs around 120Mbps on average during the school day. At peak times it needs almost 700Mbps. At the $50 per Mbps that the district already pays, Durant would need to spend over $30k per month extra!

By investing $7,000 in CACHEBOX230 Durant has been able to serve up to 682Mbps with just an 85Mbps connection.

The district could now make a far more cost-effective investment in additional bandwidth of $4250 for an extra 85Mbps. In this case CACHEBOX would have paid for itself in less than one month and saved the district over $300k per annum:

Annual cost to serve peak demand without caching: $30k x 12 = $360k

Annual cost to serve peak demand with caching: $4250 x 12 = $51k

Annual bandwidth cost saving ($360k - $51k) = $309k

Total saving ($309k) - cost of caching ($7k) = $302k pa

Woodland can reach FCC target at a fraction of the cost with CACHEBOX

With just 250Mbps shared by 6190 students, Woodland School District 50 is some way below the FCC's 100Kbps per student 2016 target. To reach this target, the school would need a further 370Mbps which, with their current supplier would cost an additional >$2000 per month.

Fortunately, as a long-time CACHEBOX user the district knows that, on the occasions that demand exceeds 250Mbps, CACHEBOX is able to help. The graph below shows that, for the majority of the time, 250Mbps is sufficient to handle demand. At times, they have needed 650Mbps which is just over FCC target at 110Kbps per student. Caching has bridged the gap at a fraction of cost of doubling the bandwidth all year around to manage the handful of occasions where it was needed.

Highland's students get faster priority classroom content

In a rural setting, Highland Local Schools would struggle to meet the FCC's 100Kbps per student target without spending a very large proportion of budget on bandwidth capacity. Fortunately CACHEBOX offers a smarter way to guarantee fast content to students.

By storing content locally and serving it from within the LAN, Highland Schools avoid the potential causes of slow content like network congestion or a content provider's slow web server.

Education content from providers/sites like Starfall, ABCya!, storylineonline, roomrecess, and mathplayground was delivered between 20 and 40 times faster from CACHEBOX than any uncached content that needed to be collected from the web.

CACHEBOX outruns 10Gbps bandwidth

With a student population of approximately 31,000, Anaheim is one of the largest school districts in California, with Internet throughput to match. But as an urban district, Anaheim has access to comparably inexpensive bandwidth - they pay the same price for 10Gbps that a rural Texan district pays for 50Mbps.

This means that Anaheim's bandwidth capacity per student is actually much higher than average, so students shouldn't suffer the effects of network congestion.

However, even with a considerably higher than average 400Kbps of bandwidth capacity per student (four times the FCC's 2016 target for schools), Anaheim's students still find content that has to be fetched from the web arrives at sub-optimal speeds.

We can see (table right) that classroom content arrives at a vast range of different speeds from the Internet, but all are significantly slower than content that is served from cache.

Even with a completely underutilized 10Gbps link, it is caching that delivers the responsive browser that the classroom demands

• Apex Learning is served 48x faster from cache
• Sparknotes is served 35x faster from cache
• Primarygames.com is served 27x faster from cache
• Historyonthenet.com is served 10x faster from cache

Glenbard reclaims capacity for education content

With a mix of Apple and Windows devices in use by over 8000 students and staff, software updates make up well over half of all Glenbard's internet traffic.

Large update files are a significant cause of network congestion for school districts. The files are often requested by the entire fleet of student devices simultaneously causing large spikes in demand and leaving little capacity for other content.

By deploying CACHEBOX, Glenbard has eliminated the software update bandwidth hog, freeing up expensive capacity for the content that matters to students and teachers.

The table below highlights that Apple alone consumes 52% of all traffic. Some software vendors provide their own caching solutions but, to support environments with kit from multiple vendors (like Glenbards), network admins would need to manage a collection of caches and wouldn't improve the performance of education content.

BYOD enabled for Pickens County

Pickens County serves 16,200 students across 16 elementary schools, 5 middle schools, and 4 high schools, covering an area of 504 square miles.

Wanting to support a BYOD scheme but ensure that congestion would not cause slow internet and low engagement levels, Pickens County consulted with neighboring school district Laurens County, and was impressed with their bandwidth saving solution - CACHEBOX.

Deployment of two CACHEBOXes at Pickens has meant over 7,700 devices, including student and staff laptops, desktops and interactive Promethean boards, have been supported over a 2Gbps bandwidth link. Their BYOD program has been fully enabled without congestion, and rather than delays in content delivery, speed in the classroom has increased exponentially.

A significant proportion of educational content is now served from cache - see table, below.

With up to 80% of traffic served from cache - up to five times as much data as from the internet - no increase in bandwidth has been needed.

In fact, rather than experiencing possible delays in content delivery, speed in the classroom has increased exponentially - from 100 to 300 times faster... even 600 times faster than delivery from the internet.

Westwood students get much faster classroom content

At nearly 280Kbps per student Westwood Schools are well above the FCC 2016 bandwidth target. But the districts $36k per annum investment in bandwidth does not always deliver the speedy web access required for advanced internet-enabled learning techniques like blended learning.

This is because bandwidth is just one of many factors that influence the speed of access to content.

With CACHEBOX, Westwood stores content locally and serves it from within the LAN, avoiding these causes of slow content.

We can see the impact of this in Westwood's caching reports where 66% of content from pbskids.org is repeat views served from cache. Despite having ample bandwidth, the PBS content that comes directly from the internet averages just 62Kbps. Whereas the content served from cache is delivered at 541Kbps.

Some sites show more dramatic peak speed increases, highlighting the fact that much of this content cannot be accessed faster simply by upgrading bandwidth.

With caching deployed, up to 53% of all requested content is now served locally from cache. Taking the lowest month (November 2017) and using 40% as the annual average reduction in bandwidth across a full year, Westwood could have saved significantly on that $20Mbps monthly cost, and still served classroom content much faster than the extra bandwidth could manage.

Even at the lowest monthly bandwidth offset it represents an annual saving:

Annual cost of bandwidth without caching: $3018 x 12 = $36,216

Potential annual bandwidth cost saving @44% average = $16,044

Total saving ($309k) - cost of caching ($7k) = $302k pa

Caching cost-effective speed for St Johns

St Johns is a large district of over 32,000 students spread across 39 schools in Florida. The district has reached the FCC's 2016 bandwidth target of 100Kbps per student, but the cost of this connectivity is huge. Reaching the 2018 target of 1Mbps per student will require an unrealistic budget, even with E-rate support. Fortunately, the district is able to deliver high speed content with a combination of existing capacity and caching appliances.

The average peak speed of web content served by CACHEBOX is consistently several times faster than content served directly from the web. That average includes sizeable software update files, but in the classroom it's what's happening to the important content that matters most.

St John's caching report for May 2017 (right) highlights the impact of caching on core learning content from Pearson, Discovery Education, PBS Kids, abcya.com and more.

Most classroom content is served between 5 and 30 times faster from cache.

The result is a significantly more 'snappy' browser experience, with less waiting for pages to load and more time to answer questions. Student engagement is optimized, saving accumulated browser wait that can amount to days of lost teaching and learning time over a school year.

1:1 scheme enabled for Nueces Canyon

When Nueces invested in a LearnPad 1:1 scheme it found that the frequent software updates requested by devices caused extreme congestion on the internet connection.

The extent of the issue became clear once the district deployed CACHEBOX. Software Updates accounted for over 70% of the data downloaded from the internet. And because the student devices were identical, much of the required data was duplicate, making it ideal for a copy to be cached and served locally.

CACHEBOX now delivers as much as 98% of software updates at Nueces - from Windows OS to the malware prevention updates highlighted below - leaving the connection clear for other content:

Louis Webb, Technical Director confirmed: "This box has nearly doubled our available bandwidth. I am seeing a much more responsive internet experience here on our WAN. I would recommend the CACHEBOX to any school - especially schools with a 1 to 1 deployment" says Louis. "I have been the tech director at our school for twenty years. I must say that CACHEBOX is the best investment with the greatest outcome of any appliance I have ever purchased for the school."

St. Pauls levels playing field with CACHEBOX

St Paul Public School District spends over a quarter million dollars on bandwidth every year. Their investment gets them well over the FCC 2016 target with over 500Kbps per student but, for some schools 1Gbps WAN links highly utilised, becoming are a bottleneck that limits internet access speeds.

CACHEBOX is being used to level the playing field by eliminating congestion during peak demand, taking traffic off the WAN links for big bandwidth savings

By serving content from within the LAN, peak utilisation of the WAN link - that would otherwise reach up to 900Mbps - is slashed to less than 200Mbps. CACHEBOX is able to serve requests for up to 470Mbps of web content.

So, with a CACHEBOX solution, Saint Paul can continue to benefit from its existing infrastructure investments and postpone costly upgrades.

In addition to bandwidth optimisation, by serving locally, CACHEBOX also speeds up the education content that matters:

• McGraw Hill content is 14 times faster
• Sparknotes content is 9 times faster
• Classroom screen content is 5 times faster

Importantly, online testing via TestNav is served 8 times faster, ensuring that those schools unable to get high capacity WAN links are not at a disadvantage.

Westwood students get much faster classroom content

At nearly 280Kbps per student Westwood Schools are well above the FCC 2016 bandwidth target. But the districts $36k per annum investment in bandwidth does not always deliver the speedy web access required for advanced internet-enabled learning techniques like blended learning.

This is because bandwidth is just one of many factors that influence the speed of access to content.

With CACHEBOX, Westwood stores content locally and serves it from within the LAN, avoiding these causes of slow content.

We can see the impact of this in Westwood's caching reports where 66% of content from pbskids.org is repeat views served from cache. Despite having ample bandwidth, the PBS content that comes directly from the internet averages just 62Kbps. Whereas the content served from cache is delivered at 541Kbps.

Some sites show more dramatic peak speed increases, highlighting the fact that much of this content cannot be accessed faster simply by upgrading bandwidth.

With caching deployed, up to 53% of all requested content is now served locally from cache. Taking the lowest month (November 2017) and using 40% as the annual average reduction in bandwidth across a full year, Westwood could have saved significantly on that $20Mbps monthly cost, and still served classroom content much faster than the extra bandwidth could manage.

Even at the lowest monthly bandwidth offset it represents an annual saving:

Annual cost of bandwidth without caching: $3018 x 12 = $36,216

Potential annual bandwidth cost saving @44% average = $16,044

Total saving ($309k) - cost of caching ($7k) = $302k pa

Without CACHEBOX, e-learning risked a ban at North Palos

North Palos SD has saved their 1:1 initiative from being abandoned due to slow, often unusable Internet access in the classroom.

Despite having a healthy 160Kbps per student, bandwidth was often saturated as half the district's users regularly needed access to web content at the same time.

A bandwidth upgrade would seem an obvious fix but, like many districts, North Palos was tied in to an expensive fixed-term contract. The cost of upgrading to a higher capacity connection was extremely high, even with E-rate funding.

So, with teachers unable to conduct lessons effectively, the Tech team planned to ban 1:1 content altogether. Fortunately, they discovered web caching.

With caching, North Palos now downloads and stores just a single copy of content locally. This satisfies all subsequent requests at lightning fast LAN speeds - without consuming more bandwidth.

Results have been instant. By January, over half of all web content was served from cache, freeing up 52.9% of capacity for other content. On average 90% of education content from google, ABCya!, pbskids and many more is now served from cache - 5, 10, sometimes hundreds of times faster than from the web.

Caching has effectively doubled existing bandwidth capacity. North Palos now has the fast, reliable service it needed, at considerably lower cost than a bandwidth upgrade.

Caching multiplies Newcomerstown internet capacity

Newcomerstown district in Ohio pay almost $2000 per month for a 200Mbps connection to serve 961 students across 4 schools. Despite reaching it's 2017 'capacity per student' FCC target, Newcomerstown often found its network congested, leaving students and teachers with slow, sometimes unusable web access. When students were directed to specific content at the start of lessons, access slowed - page-load times spiralled - and lessons were negatively impacted.

As the district already pay a higher than average price for bandwidth in their locale, upgrading the connection to cater for this peak traffic would not only be costly but deliver poor value for money.

By deploying CACHEBOX, a highly affordable solution, there's no need to upgrade. By storing and serving popular content locally, even whole classes accessing the same material at the same time are served instantly. With cached content being delivered at LAN speeds there's no waiting - and, as no bandwidth is consumed, there's more being made available for other content.

With CACHEBOX, Newcomerstown has satisfied peak demand as high as 574Mbps, almost 3 times its existing capacity, and for a fraction of the price of another bandwidth upgrade.

Caching delivers powerful e-learning experience at Calexico

To maintain low tuition fees, Calexico Mission School operates on much lower-than-average budgets. But it doesn't economize on its e-Learning ambitions. So when web traffic from just 80 of its 300 students would saturate its 15Mbps internet connection, it planned a leap to 100Mbps. .

Rather than simply spending a large proportion of its tech budget on extremely expensive bandwidth, the school opted to combine a smaller 50Mbps upgrade with a CACHEBOX110 at a fraction of the cost.

The upgrade to 50Mbps has helped, but with caching added, Calexico Mission has been able to handle peak web traffic well above 100Mbps. What's more, content served from the local cache is served 4 times faster than that from the internet.

By doubling effective capacity without breaking the bank, the school has been able to add more student devices and can realistically consider introducing a BYOD scheme.