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The evidence is in:
Districts that cache get far better outcomes - and value - from bandwidth spend

To get better value from bandwidth provision, and to improve internet performance in the classroom, the FCC funds caching technologies under E-Rate Category 2.

ApplianSys has the only fit-for-purpose solution dedicated to schools web caching. It has been overwhelmingly the most selected option in E-rate's 'caching' category since this was added to the program.

School district technology leaders often question the benefit of caching. With hundreds of our devices now installed across 40 states, we are uniquely positioned to report on the actual outcomes where caching has been deployed.

The evidence is indisputable: bandwidth hogs are eliminated, congestion peaks are flattened and education content is much, much faster. By augmenting bandwidth investments with caching, districts can implement internet-enabled learning schemes cost-effectively, with confidence that their connection will cope with an ever-increasing demand for online content in the classroom.

  • Show me schools with problems like mine:

  • timerSlow web
  • attach_moneyCostly bandwidth
  • system_updateSoftware updates
  • perm_scan_wifiCongestion spikes
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Moses Lake, WAadd_circle
Moses Lake, WAclose

Moses Lake wanted to roll out its successful 1:1 pilot but needing to upgrade bandwidth at 15 schools was making it financially impossible.

With caching offloading 80%+ of demand, each school has been able to launch e-learning more affordably, without paying higher monthly fees.


The solution
Hamilton, CAadd_circle
Hamilton, CAclose

With plans of expanding 1:1 and BYOD across its 3 schools, Hamilton needed a reliable caching solution to eliminate congestion and guarantee access to e-learning in class.

By serving the majority of traffic locally, Hamilton’s teachers and students access all the educational content they need, free from congestion.


The solution
Muscatine, IAadd_circle
Muscatine, IAclose

Despite disappointing experience with old caching technology in the past, Muscatine has come to rely on CACHEBOX to alleviate congestion regardless of its ever-evolving 1:1 learning platforms.


The solution
Tallassee City, ALadd_circle
Tallassee City, ALclose

Despite having upgraded bandwidth capacity significantly, Tallassee City’s teachers reported slow web speeds in the classroom.

Content fetched from particularly slow servers upstream can’t be accelerated – even with unlimited capacity. By serving content locally from CACHEBOX, that same content is 30, 50, even 77 times faster!


The solution
Warren County, MOadd_circle
Warren County, MOclose

Warren County’s Network Administrator didn’t really know if caching would make a difference, but with E-Rate funding the tech, he thought it might be worth considering.

Now he’s very glad he did. Learning content now arrives hundreds of times faster.


The solution
St Joseph, OHadd_circle
St Joseph, OHclose

St Joseph couldn’t afford the upgrade costs and extra kit needed to deliver more bandwidth. CACHEBOX helped the school boost capacity - using the existing infrastructure - in a cost-effective way.

With 89% of the school’s content served from cache, demand on the connection is slashed to 11%.


The solution
Pretty Eagle, MTadd_circle
Pretty Eagle, MTclose

Even with 625Kbps of bandwidth per student, Pretty Eagle’s staff and students experienced slow web content.

As a private rural school without state or federal grants, buying more bandwidth was not an option.


The solution
Fairbanks, AKadd_circle
Fairbanks, AKclose

With network congestion a daily occurrence in its remote Alaskan schools but bandwidth simply too expensive, Fairbanks’s Networking Director needed an alternative solution.

Hoping modern caching wasn’t the same tech he had struggled with years before, the district turned to CACHEBOX.


The solution
Orchard Farm, MOadd_circle
Orchard Farm, MOclose

On a recommendation from a neighbouring school, Orchard Farm chose CACHEBOX instead of a bandwidth upgrade to alleviate congestion.

As bandwidth costs have dropped over the years, the district has secured more for the same price, but CACHEBOX has outperformed it, delivering vital boosts to meet spikes in demand.


The solution
Dexter, NMadd_circle
Dexter, NMclose

Huge volumes of software update demand at rural district Dexter frequently jammed the network, causing slow speeds and a poor e-learning experience for its 1,000+ students.

With classroom lessons at risk, Dexter turned to caching to better offload demand and free up access to e-Learning content.


The solution
Merrimack Valley, NHadd_circle
Merrimack Valley, NHclose

Despite a bandwidth upgrade, Merrimack Valley’s students couldn’t access online content on their new 1:1 devices quickly enough. Large spikes in simultaneous demand were causing congestion.

But with caching meeting that same demand locally, the spikes are gone.


The solution
String Theory Schools, PAadd_circle
String Theory, PAclose

As full ‘apple’ teaching environments, String Theory schools expected to be leading the way in e-learning best practice, however it faced too much non-learning content. With internet capacity saturated and Apple Caching not making much of a difference, classrooms were facing severe slowdowns.

Needing a smarter, more powerful, all-encompassing cache – it turned to CACHEBOX.


The solution
Sand Ridge, ORadd_circle
Sand Ridge, ORclose

Sand Ridge and Sweet Home Charter Schools in rural Oregon both struggled with reliable connectivity during state testing periods. Congestion from spikes in traffic would bring everything to a halt at both schools.

With learning outcomes at risk, the schools’ tech manager applied for E-Rate funding for a caching solution – happily he got a lot more than expected with CACHEBOX.


The solution
Strafford, MOadd_circle
Strafford, MOclose

For suburban Strafford School District R6, a narrow 375Mbps connection shared between 1,200 devices meant heavy network congestion.

With hundreds of devices requesting bandwidth-hungry software updates, the district deployed CACHEBOX to cache heavy files and serve them locally.


The solution
The SEED Public School, D.C.add_circle
The SEED Public School, DCclose

With SEED’s 350 user devices demanding different software updates throughout the day, congestion was curbing lessons, videos were buffering, and online resources were not loading.

With CACHEBOX offloading updates and serving them locally, more bandwidth is made available for video and other online resources.


The solution
Worth, ILadd_circle
Worth, ILclose

With congestion slowing down access to video and learning content in the classroom and PARCC testing at risk of disruption, Worth SD looked to E-rate caching for help.

But instead of Apple Caching, it chose to benefit from the all-encompassing caching power of CACHEBOX. Offloading classroom content from all sources and platforms, as well as software updates for all of its devices, secured significantly higher ROI.


The solution
Galax City, VAadd_circle
Galax City, VAclose

Rolling out 1:1 was headache enough - but ensuring concurrent user access wouldn’t impede its evolving e-learning schemes meant Galax City needed an easy to use solution beyond simply adding capacity.


The solution
Riverside, KSadd_circle
Riverside, KSclose

For suburban Riverside Unified School District, even a 1Gbps connection shared between 800 devices meant repeated network congestion and slow speeds in class.

With hundreds of devices requesting bandwidth-hungry software updates, the district deployed CACHEBOX to cache heavy files and serve them locally.


The solution
Lakewood City, OHadd_circle
Lakewood City, OHclose

Urban district Lakewood City had no problem getting high speed internet, but its portion of shared access was getting congested.

With thousands of devices demanding updates it was proving too much for its internet allocation, but the district tied to a contract until 2020, it needed another way free up access in the classroom.


The solution
Windber Area, PAadd_circle
Windber Area, PAclose

Windber had high ‘per student’ capacity - in line with FCC targets - but its network would still frequently grind to a halt.

With software updates from its increasing number of 1:1 devices clogging up bandwidth – it turned to a solution it’s Tech Director knew well, having used it at a neighboring Pennsylvania district.


The solution
Monett, MOadd_circle
Monett, MOclose

Monett’s DIY caching setup was labor-intensive and cached only limited content. As demand evolved to include software updates, video and complex content – it was being left behind.

A specialized appliance for schools, CACHEBOX requires minimal effort for unbeatable results, caching everything a school needs.

The solution
Bozeman, MTadd_circle
Bozeman, MTclose

With 6,000 devices in use, Bozeman’s bandwidth was being squeezed. But not, as it expected, by too much demand for learning content.

With classroom access to online learning slowing, Bozeman applied for E-rate-funded caching. But only in deploying CACHEBOX and slashing total demand by 86% – did it uncover software updates as the culprit.


The solution
Vernon Parish, LAadd_circle
Vernon Parish, LA close

With over 9,000 devices downloading bandwidth-hungry software updates and media-rich content, Vernon Parish experienced a dramatic slowdown in web access and poor user experience.

The district eliminated congestion by investing in a caching solution that handles the majority of traffic demand - up to 90% monthly.


The solution
SouthWest R-V, MOadd_circle
SouthWest R-V, MOclose

A consortia-led allocation of 80Mbps for Southwest meant limited access to media-rich e-learning content for almost 900 connected students.

With high demand and long delays becoming a daily struggle, the district turned to a caching solution to deliver the capacity boost needed.


The solution
Washington Township, NJadd_circle
Washington Township, NJclose

With huge system updates from Apple, Microsoft and Edge Suite regularly congesting the network, Washington Township’s large investment in 1:1 was at risk of abandonment.

Now, CACHEBOX serves as much as 93% of total network traffic directly from cache, taking the load off the network and accelerating requests directly from the district’s LAN.


The solution
St Ambrose, AZadd_circle
St Ambrose, AZclose

St Ambrose needed fast and reliable access to the internet and online testing, on just 30Mbps of copper connection.

CACHEBOX helped St Ambrose maximize their existing bandwidth use, so they could eliminate congestions and dramatically increased the speed of educational content delivery on the network.


The solution
Spring Cove, PAadd_circle
Spring Cove, PAclose

Running comprehensive Cyber School programs for Grades 2 through 12, including Odysseyware for personalized instruction, Spring Cove was all set to exploit e-Learning. But small WAN links were stifling access to its 1Gbps internet link, causing congestion and severely impacting learning.

With funding for caching from E-rate, the district has deployed CACHEBOX – instantly accelerating content, invigorating learning practices: educational gaming content is now 300 times faster!

The Solution
Guy-Perkins, ARadd_circle
Guy-Perkins, ARclose

Tied to a consortia for a small share of a larger bandwidth purchase to keep costs low, Guy-Perkins’ drive towards 1:1 meant significant traffic growth beyond its allocation.

As caching would deliver the cost-effective capacity boost needed, it chose the #1 E-rate funded solution, CACHEBOX.


The solution
Cambridge-Isanti, MNadd_circle
Cambridge-Isanti, MNclose

How does a rural school district with expensive bandwidth and over 5,000 students meet its growing demand for video content? By serving 90% of all Google Video and YouTube requests from CACHEBOX.


The solution
Edison, CAadd_circle
Edison, CAclose

Edison’s 100Mbps connection was proving to be insufficient. But at $4000 per month, the district sought a better value solution to its connectivity problem.

Caching has offloaded a huge proportion of the districts traffic, giving teachers and students the speed they need in class.


The solution
Queen of the Rosary, ILadd_circle
Queen of the Rosary, ILclose

Queen of the Rosary, a private school in Illinois, often suffered from slow web access whenever software updates occurred - overwhelming its connection, despite having just 138 users.

Needing to avoid paying out for more costly capacity while it more than doubled its 1:1 devices, it chose CACHEBOX to deliver the extra capacity needed at considerably less cost.


The solution
Hampton-Dumont, IAadd_circle
Hampton-Dumont, IAclose

As Hampton-Dumont ramped-up web-based learning in the classroom, it knew sustaining adequate access to content was vital.

At the time, the FCC was recommending 5 times its existing capacity – but that was way beyond the district’s reach. It needed a better-fit solution.


The solution
Esko, MNadd_circle
Esko, MNclose

Esko planned to go live with 1,200 new devices over summer. But with a network already often saturated – the 5 times leap in web users risked disaster.

With CACHEBOX boosting capacity by more than 3 times, the transition to 1:1 learning went without a hitch.


The solution
Dartmouth, MAadd_circle
Dartmouth, MAclose

With 1:1 expanding across its schools, Dartmouth needed a cast-iron solution for eliminating congestion and guaranteeing a fast, responsive online learning experience.

Only CACHEBOX guarantees fast content – meeting demand locally - at much faster LAN speeds.

The Solution
Brookfield, WIadd_circle
Brookfield, WIclose

With plans to distribute more student devices, Brookfield knew their existing internet connection was not up to speed.

Their computer lab was already quite slow, even when just half full, so they deployed a CACHEBOX210 to maximize bandwidth and accelerate their Internet speed.


The solution
Woodland, ILadd_circle
Woodland SD 50close

Reaching FCC's 100Kbps per student target would give Woodland SD 50 exactly the bandwidth they need.

But using CACHEBOX to achieve the same would save them, and the FCC, $100k over 5 years.

The solution
Calexico, CAadd_circle
Calexico, CAclose

To maintain low tuition fees, Calexico Mission School is careful with tech budgets.

Caching has shaved thousands off the district's bandwidth bill, whilst delivering capacity and speed increases.

The solution
Durant CSD, IAadd_circle
Durant CSDclose

Durant's 85Mbps internet link was often saturated. But with a monthly bill of over $4k, catering for 680Mbps demand spikes with 10 times more bandwidth was simply not financially feasible.

With CACHEBOX, a much smaller upgrade is all that's needed.

The solution
Los Lunas, NMadd_circle
Los Lunas, NMclose

With over 5,500 connected devices downloading huge volumes of traffic including software updates and e-Learning materials, Los Lunas frequently experienced network congestion and slow speeds.

Planning to implement 1:1 for all 15 campuses, the district needed to invest in a solution that would handle the major increase in traffic volume while offering full traffic visibility.

The solution
Saint Johns, FLadd_circle
St Johns SDclose

With the cost of meeting the FCC’s 2016 bandwidth-per-student target having already consumed excessive budget, 2018’s much higher target simply wasn’t possible. But with demand growing, St Johns was worried online access would slow down significantly, and have an impact on learning.

The solution
North Ottawa, KSadd_circle
North Ottawaclose

As a rural school, even small connections cost big bucks. With CACHEBOX, the school could serve the same volume of web content using just a 50Mbps internet connection, saving $9k each year on bandwidth.

The Solution
Miami Dade, FLadd_circle
Miami Dadeclose

With 220 remote schools relying on small rural internet connections, access to Miami-Dade’s central online learning platform was inconsistent – and often too slow for many.

Lost lesson time was risking learning outcomes.

The Solution
Sioux Central, IAadd_circle
Sioux Centralclose

With a 35Mbps pipe, Sioux Central's connection often maxed out with peak demand over 140Mbps.

A big bandwidth upgrade was tempting but caching was far more cost-effective.

The Solution
Conemaugh, PAadd_circle
Conemaugh, PAclose

Even with just 500 devices accessing its 200Mbps internet connection, heavy traffic caused by frequent software updates led to slow speeds and a poor user experience.

Looking to implement full 1:1 learning, the district was planning a threefold increase in device numbers, so it needed a way to handle the expected leap in traffic.

The solution
Newcomerstown, OHadd_circle
Newcomerstown, OHclose

Newcomerstown district serves 961 students across 4 schools with a 200Mbps connection. However, network demand would often spike significantly higher, resulting in congestion and a slow user experience.

CACHEBOX provides an additional 600Mbps at these peak times, eliminating congestion.

The Solution
Anaheim Union, CAadd_circle
Anaheim HSDclose

Even with a 10Gbps internet connection - over 400Kbps per student - Anaheim Union still found content slow to reach the classroom.
CACHEBOX serves the same content 30 times faster.

The Solution
Glenbard, ILadd_circle
Glenbard HSD 87close

Glenbard pays over $7200 per month for 2Gbps bandwidth, but over half of all traffic is Software updates for 1:1 devices.
CACHEBOX has reclaimed that capacity for education content.

The Solution
Oak Grove RIV, MOadd_circle
Oak Grove RIVclose

Oak Grove's 1Gbps connection puts it well over FCCs 100Kbps per student target.

But with CACHEBOX bandwidth saving, the same can be achieved at a much lower cost.

The Solution
Westwood, IAadd_circle
Westwood CSDclose

For a premium online classroom experience, Westwood CSD invested in more than double the FCC's per student capacity target of 100kbps.

But, after upgrading, it was disappointed to find lots of content still arriving slowly. Students just weren’t seeing the expected benefits – paying out for extra bandwidth wasn’t good value.

The Solution
Nueces Canyon, TXadd_circle
Nueces Canyon CISDclose

Nueces Canyon's 45Mbps pipe was often saturated by heavy files, like MS Windows software updates. Needing to reduce congestion, to enable a 1:1 'LearnPad' scheme, Nueces turned to CACHEBOX for a solution.

The Solution
Pickens, SC add_circle
Pickens County SDclose

In implementing a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) scheme across the district, Pickens knew that internet demand would soar. Congestion-free web access is vital to the scheme's success. However, upgrading its already expensive bandwidth was just too high a price to pay.

Instead, it chose caching to guarantee the fast access it needed but at a fraction of the cost.

The Solution
Saint Paul, MNadd_circle
Saint Paul Public School Districtclose

St Paul Public School District has 5 times FCC's 2016 target 100Kbps per student student to ensure fast, reliable web access. CACHEBOX boosts the districts investment in high capacity by eliminating.

The Solution
Black River Falls, WIadd_circle
Black River Falls, WIclose

Following implementation of 1:1, rising demand from more users and their devices was putting the squeeze on capacity at Black River Falls, causing frustrating delays for students and teachers.

Deploying CACHEBOX quickly freed up 50% of their bandwidth, enabling unrestricted web access, faster content and space for more users.

The Solution
Southwest Barry, MOadd_circle
Southwest Barry, MOclose

Southwest Barry Community School District R5 is an 800-student district in rural south west MO that pays $3,000 per month for an 80Mbps internet connection.

The district deployed caching in 2015 and now benefits from the equivalent of 275Mbps at less than half the price per Mbps.

The Solution
North Palos, ILadd_circle
North Palos 117close

Having implemented 1:1 across the district, North Palos found its students struggling with a very hit and miss online experience. But its fixed-term bandwidth contract left it facing a classroom ban on 1:1 content in order to cope.

The Solution
Brandon School District, MIadd_circle
Brandon SD, MIclose

Brandon benefits from a large 10Gbps internet connection that supports less than 3,000 students. But with 1:1 implemented, it would regularly find its 3,000 devices downloading large software update files that would consume bandwidth – often all day long. The congestion caused made the internet too slow for effective e-Learning.

They deployed a CACHEBOX and quickly freed up between 40 and 75% of their bandwidth, leading to faster access to content in class.


The Solution
Big Horn County, WYadd_circle
Big Horn County SD3, WYclose

Since it deployed caching the effective capacity available at Big Horn has quadrupled allowing them to benefit from up to 800 Mbps of capacity at a quarter the price per Mbps.

The Solution
East Peoria HSD, ILadd_circle
East Peoria HSD, ILclose

Having introduced a 1:1 scheme, East Peoria quickly ran into internet access problems. Huge spikes in traffic would quickly saturate the network and slow down access for everyone, impacting the classroom.

But a bandwidth upgrade was going to cost $000s extra every month. So East Peoria turned to caching to get the speed they needed - without upgrading.

The Solution
Hannibal SD, MOadd_circle
Hannibal SD, MOclose

With 8 schools accessing masses of learning content and video, congestion would regularly impact lessons at Hannibal SD - video wouldn't play, apps didn't work, pages took too long to load.

Facing countless complaints from the classroom, the tech team was forced to ban YouTube altogether - severely impacting the curriculum.

The Solution
Airport CSD, MIadd_circle
Airport CSD, MIclose

Despite a healthy 1Gbps internet connection, Airport Community students struggled to access YouTube content in the classroom.

With its six school buildings each connecting at just 100Mbps, concurrent access resulted in network congestion – leaving video buffering. The District needed caching to deliver faster content in classrooms.

The Solution
Snyder ISD, TXadd_circle
Snyder ISD, TXclose

Thanks to a comparatively high 1Gbps connection at its High School, internet demand at Snyder Independent doesn't come close to saturating its internet link.

No queues means no delays. But even here, the district recognized the potential for caching to accelerate content and deliver the optimal e-learning experience.

The Solution
Fredericktown, OHadd_circle
Fredericktown Local, OHclose

Fredericktown's modest bandwidth cost over $2,600 each month, so upgrading to meet the FCC's 2017 'per student capacity' of 100kbps was going to be expensive.

By opting for an affordable CACHEBOX instead, they've been able to multiply effective capacity by 9 times - delivering up to 797kbps per student at peak times.

The Solution
Claremont, CAadd_circle
Claremont, CAclose

Expanding BYOD across its 10 sites and adding more iPads has caused a dramatic slowdown in web access at Claremont Unified School District.

By caching problematic software updates, Claremont has defeated its bandwidth hogs.

The Solution
El Dorado, MOadd_circle
El Dorado Springs, MOclose

Despite 3 bandwidth upgrades, El Dorado Springs suffered huge congestion from huge software update files.

Now, CACHEBOX continues to serve as much as 96% of the district's most bandwidth-heavy content.

The Solution
Browning, MTadd_circle
Browning Public Schools, MTclose

Browning Schools in rural Montana spends $3750 per month for a 550 Mbps connection - shared among 2200 students across 10 sites.

CACHEBOX consistently keeps the district’s traffic below 500Mbps, avoiding the need for an expensive bandwidth upgrade.

The Solution
Highland, OHadd_circle
Highland Schoolsclose

In its rural setting, Highland Local faces expensive bandwidth costs, so it would struggle to match the high speed capacities of other schools.

But by serving web content locally, from within the LAN, it guarantees the fast access it needs where it matters - in the classroom.

The Solution
Ronan, MTadd_circle
Ronan SD30, MTclose

Simultaneous demand in the classroom for the very same content, means demand spikes way higher than normal - congesting Ronan's limited rural bandwidth capacity. The result? A dramatic slowdown in access - often rendering e-Learning unusable.

By caching popular content, it can be served locally at LAN speeds, making it many, many times faster - regardless of existing capacity.

The Solution
Alcorn, MSadd_circle
Alcorn Schools, MSclose

Forcing other web users to stay offline while some sat online tests was always far from ideal, so Alcorn upgraded bandwidth. But with hundreds of devices going online simultaneously, the district still couldn’t guarantee reliably fast web access.

Following a recommendation, CACHEBOX was soon in place, slashing demand on their bandwidth by as much as 82% by serving popular content locally.

The Solution
Laurens County SD 55, SCadd_circle
Laurens County SD 55, SCclose

In rolling out 1:1, Laurens found – in common with other districts – that it needed to continually upgrade bandwidth. But even its new 1Gbps connection couldn’t prevent online content from arriving slowly.

With students struggling to use their devices effectively, Laurens turned to caching to guarantee far faster speeds.

The Solution
Orient-Macksburg, IAadd_circle
Orient-Macksburg, IAclose

Like most districts, Orient-Macksburg expanded web-based learning across its curriculum, but as internet demand grew, so did network congestion - resulting in slow, unresponsive classroom access.

But with bandwidth allocated by the State, an upgrade was impossible. So the district turned to CACHEBOX to accelerate web content in the classroom – it’s now up to 36 times faster!

The Solution
South-East Webster, MOadd_circle
South-East Webster, MOclose

With twice as many devices as users, the district tech team found themselves at the mercy of operating system updates - huge file downloads that crippled bandwidth. CACHEBOX instantly offloads this content, freeing up capacity for content that matters.

The Solution
Trinity School, MDadd_circle
Trinity Schoolclose

Trinity's 50Mbps was heavily congested at peak times such as the start of lessons.

With CACHEBOX, the school has gained the equivalent of a 350Mbps connection.

The Solution
Tech Center Du Page, ILadd_circle
Tech Center Du Page, ILclose

Technology Center of Du Page in Addison, Illinois, is a technical school with a 100Mbps connection and approximately 1,000 network users. CACHEBOX is providing over 2X their original capacity at ½ the price per Mbps.

The Solution
TAFT Independent, TXadd_circle
TAFT Independent, TXclose

After upgrading bandwidth, Taft ISD expected faster content in the classroom. But even with just 100 devices connected at the same time, the internet often seemed slow and unresponsive.

Offloading software updates freed up capacity for more important content.

The Solution
Arkadelphia, ARadd_circle
Arkadelphia, ARclose

With bandwidth allocated by the state, Arkadelphia is unable to upgrade capacity, even though its network is regularly congested. Caching content locally enables the district to multiply effective capacity and meet higher demand levels.

The Solution
Chase Raymond, KSadd_circle
Chase Raymond, KSclose

Implementing 1:1 was costly enough, but upgrading bandwidth to match expected growth was beyond Chase-Raymond's budgets. CACHEBOX, a much more cost-effective way to multiply capacity, did the job at a fraction of the price.

The Solution
Keokuk CSD, IAadd_circle
Keokuk CSD, IAclose

Keokuk's 1:1 scheme meant huge increases in internet traffic, especially for media-rich content, causing congestion and complaints of a slow user experience. But with CACHEBOX, up to 50% of requested content is served from local cache - and is up to 100x faster.

The Solution
Gilmer ISD, TXadd_circle
Gilmer ISD, TXclose

With 1:1 rollout at Gilmer, the increase in traffic from software updates for student devices regularly congested the network. In deploying a CACHEBOX, Gilmer instantly freed up 50% of bandwidth - eliminating congestion by taking these bandwidth hogs off the internet.

The Solution
Carl Junction, MOadd_circle
Carl Junction, MOclose

With predicted 1:1 traffic likely requiring double their existing bandwidth, costing $7k pa. more, Carl Junction opted for a CACHEBOX to meet extra demand, saving $28k over 5 years.

The Solution
McGregor ISD, MNadd_circle
McGregor ISD, MNclose

To avoid replacing its content filter, McGregor ISD wanted to expand its Apple e-learning scheme without upgrading its 300Mbps link. It achieved this by deploying CACHEBOX to serve much of its content locally.

The Solution
Franklin Area SD, PAadd_circle
Franklin Area SD, PAclose

Franklin doesn't want to spend more on bandwidth - it's expensive in their rural locale. However, software updates for devices have spiraled, consuming precious capacity.

Thankfully CACHEBOX caches these huge bandwidth-heavy files - enabling Franklin to offload up to 99% of content - freeing up capacity for what's important.

The Solution
Clarksville ISD, TXadd_circle
Clarksville ISD, TXclose

In rural Texas bandwidth is pricey, so controlling demand for web content is the only way to prevent an upgrade. But Clarksville didn't need to limit access to e-learning... it simply deployed an affordable CACHEBOX to store and serve popular content locally.

The Solution
Pyramid Lake High School, NVadd_circle
Pyramid Lake High School, NVclose

As a public tribal school in a remote location, Pyramid Lake faces excessively high bandwidth fees. However, its 72 students enjoy higher 'capacity per student' than some urban districts - but at a cost of $1000s per month. And yet congestion was still a problem until CACHEBOX reclaimed masses of 'hogged' bandwidth for the classroom.

The Solution
The Mary Louis Academy, NYadd_circle
The Mary Louis Academy, NYclose

Teachers at The Mary Louis Academy complained of constant video-buffering in class. With 800+ tablets and a pro-BYOD policy, huge demand for software updates was consuming internet capacity, slowly downloading through school hours.

With CACHEBOX the Academy is meeting multiple demands simultaneously from just a single download - and doing it much faster.

The Solution
Des Moines Christian School, IA add_circle
Des Moines Christian School, IAclose

At Des Moines, Apple, iOS, Windows, Chromebook, Android and even BYOD devices constantly access the network. When they independently need to update software, the resulting congestion can clog the network. CACHEBOX is the only schools-focused cache that can handle all this content in one easy-to-use appliance.

The Solution
Fowler School District, CAadd_circle
Fowler School District, CAclose

Fowler wanted the fastest web experience for its students, so it paid out for extra bandwidth. But despite reaching the FCC’s ‘capacity per student’ target almost 2 years early, congestion still left students waiting.
Extra bandwidth had not delivered the expected speeds.

CACHEBOX not only quashed congestion but accelerated classroom content up to 40x faster.

The Solution
Delano Joint Union High SD, CAadd_circle
Delano Joint Union High SD, CAclose

Award-winning district Delano values fast, responsive internet in the classroom, maintaining a 1Gbps connection, despite the high local price for bandwidth. With school traffic projected to keep rising steadily, it has future-proofed its current investment and capacity with caching - freeing up to 87% for more content or more users.

The Solution
Kirkwood School District, MOadd_circle
Kirkwood School District, MOclose

With plans to expand 1:1 to all 5,700 students, Kirkwood knew demand for learning content would increase to match. But worse, it feared rising software update demand might impede user experience.

Following a recommendation from a neighboring district, demand has instead dropped - as up to 72% of total demand is now met locally, from cache.

The Solution
Hollister School District R-V, MOadd_circle
Hollister School District R-V, MOclose

With classroom disruption from 1:1 traffic congestion, Hollister was facing a step backwards in classroom tech.

Devices were often unusable due to long page-load times and content-buffering. The district reached the point of shelving them – but knew this would seriously impact the curriculum. With CACHEBOX slashing internet traffic by as much as 72%, speed in the classroom has rocketed.

The Solution
Edison offloads heavy traffic to give teachers the speed they need

Edison School District uses a combination of online learning tools to facilitate e-Learning for its 1,100 students. This includes online videos and Pearson testing.

Despite paying almost $4,000/month for bandwidth in 2018, Edison SD was limited to just 100Mbps. That’s just 90kbps per student, insufficient for modern web content.

Edison School District, CA

2 Schools | 1,059 Students
Rural | 500Mbps

At the start of lessons, teachers in classrooms across the district would direct hundreds of students to video content simultaneously. At these times, bandwidth quickly became saturated, causing slow speeds.

The district also struggled with online testing periods. The sheer increase in network traffic from Pearson Testnav caused the network to grind to a halt at this crucial time for students and teachers.

By deploying CACHEBOX, Edison SD has eliminated congestion from software updates, freeing up expensive bandwidth capacity for the content that matters to students and teachers.

Large software 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. At these times Gigabytes or Terabytes of software updates generate large spikes in demand, leaving little capacity for critical classroom content.

On average, the district has benefited from bandwidth savings of between 87-93% each month.

The vast majority of cached traffic comprises Microsoft and Windows updates, as well as Google video content.

Stop huge 1:1 device updates from crippling your network

Kirkwood's plans to expand 1:1 would not only replace 1700 laptops at the High School but add an extra 4,000 iPads to the network. With so many devices accessing the web, it expected a huge increase in demand for bandwidth especially for software updates.

But seeing the results of caching in similar-sized neighboring district Lindbergh, Kirkwood quickly followed suit and opted for CACHEBOX to help meet demand.

Kirkwood School District, MO

9 Schools | 5,700 Students
Urban | 500Mbps

Despite learning traffic from 1,000s of extra devices, and worse, their continual requests for software updates, CACHEBOX has met up to 72% of total internet demand locally, from its cache storage.

With software updates rising to account for over 76% of ALL demand - Kirkwood's existing bandwidth would have been saturated. But CACHEBOX has met 80% of Apple, 89% of Adobe and 92% of Microsoft requests locally. In a single month of 15.7TB total downloads, CACHEBOX offloaded 12TB's worth of content - which freed up huge amounts of capacity for other more important content in the classroom.

More bandwidth doesn't guarantee speed in the classroom

To secure the best e-learning experience for its students, Fowler invested heavily in bandwidth. So much so, it surpassed the FCC’s 2018 ‘per student’ target back in 2016.

Fowler School District, CA

1 School | 2,600 Students
Suburban | 2Gbps

However - despite all that extra capacity - when students accessed the online material set by teachers, the sudden spike in simultaneous demand resulted in congestion. Page-load times increased or content failed to load at all, locking some students out of lessons – not the ideal user experience Fowler had sought.

By meeting demand for duplicate content from local cache storage, the district has slashed internet traffic. With CACHEBOX, just one download can meet all subsequent requests instantly – putting an end to queuing - and freeing up masses of unused capacity for other content.

But CACHEBOX has given Fowler more... Because content is served from within the LAN, it reaches the classroom at LAN speeds - often many times quicker than from the internet. With speed now 8x, 24x, right up to 40x faster - the responsive user experience it demanded has been realized, without wasting more funds catering for duplicate traffic.

Faster web access by maximizing existing capacity – no upgrade needed

With 1500 student devices regularly accessing the internet, Hollister School District’s 1:1 250Mbps link was often congested. The resulting slowdown was causing significant disruption in the classroom. Teachers were struggling to use video, and with online testing coming soon, the district was worried.

Hollister School District R-V, MO

2 Schools | 1,392 Students
Rural | 250Mbps

Having already upgraded recently from 100Mbps to a new fixed-term contract for 250Mbps, a further upgrade was out of the question. The district found itself facing a step back in its technology plan and the real prospect of returning student devices to the shelf.

Luckily, with E-rate funding, the district was able to purchase a CACHEBOX – and had soon offloaded up to 70% of traffic to the cache. With congestion no longer a problem, and the majority of content now served at LAN speeds, content in the classroom arrives up to 46 times faster.

Almost a year on and Hollister’s bandwidth contract is now due for renewal. But the district is happily postponing that next step to 500Mbps – it’s simply not needed. And with the budget saved from higher annual fees and network kit – the district can focus on maximizing its investment in devices, online curricula and new learning projects.

By removing the need for bandwidth upgrades, Chase Raymond future-proofs its 1:1 scheme.

We’ve worked with many districts that have invested in student devices only to find that their internet connection cannot cope with the additional demand. The most obvious step is to upgrade bandwidth but smart districts are turning to caching for a long term, cost-effective fix.

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.

Chase Raymond, KS

3 Schools | 162 Students
Rural | 50Mbps

But having spent budget on devices, a pricey bandwidth upgrade was not attractive. Fortunately for the district, their tech advisor discovered how affordable caching with CACHEBOX can be.

For less than the price of a few month's upgraded bandwidth, CACHEBOX has lowered bandwidth need dramatically. By serving up to 73% of all requests from the local cache, demand on the internet connection rarely reaches above 15Mbps. It's CACHEBOX that now meets higher demand levels - regularly at well over 40Mbps.

With internet usage now so low, any bandwidth upgrade has been postponed indefinitely.

"I'm in shock of how low our need is after the CACHEBOX", says Jerry Butler, Tech Advisor to the district.

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.

Keokuk Community School District, IA

4 Schools | 1,844 Students | LOCALE | 225 upgraded to 500Mbps

Now over 50% of content is served locally from cache - and on average, its 10x faster than from the web - with some sites as much as 100x faster - making a huge difference in the classroom for teachers and students.

So, when the district's concurrent users doubled, then tripled, CACHEBOX was able to meet those new spikes in demand, with no need for additional bandwidth or changes to infrastructure.

Gilmer eliminates bandwidth congestion with caching that handles all software vendor's files

Gilmer's 1:1 scheme means that up to 2,400 devices access the network many times a day. Those devices frequently request huge software update files from vendors like Microsoft and Apple.

But Terabytes of duplicate requests for these quickly congested the internet connection, resulting in slow access to critical e-Learning content.

Gilmer ISD, TX

4 Schools | 2,400 Students
Suburban | 650Mbps

As much as half of the district's network traffic consists of software updates. But with CACHEBOX, once one copy of an update has been downloaded, more than 90% of future requests are now served locally. With that capacity freed up, Gilmer’s students get much faster access to priority content.

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.

Carl Junction School District R1, MO

8 Schools | 3,500 Students
Suburban | 355Mbps

Before Carl Junction School District in Missouri implemented a 1:1 scheme, its 100Mbps connection had been wholly suitable – but they knew that 1000 extra devices regularly connecting to the network was going to be a problem. Already paying $15,000 a year for 100Mbps, doubling capacity would cost a further $7000.

Sharing their concerns with neighbouring school Webb City, they learned that a CACHEBOX, not a bandwidth upgrade, had been the most affordable effective solution for handling higher levels of peak traffic.

The district deployed a CACHEBOX210 and, when concurrent users doubled, huge spikes in demand for content were served locally, with up to 50% of all traffic served from cache. And because that content is served locally via the LAN, it was delivered at lightning fast LAN speeds.

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.

McGregor Independent School District, MN

2 Schools | 416 Students
Rural | 300Mbps

The result? A slow, unresponsive user experience that only delivered dissatisfaction - students found video slow to load or often unwatchable, wasting valuable lesson time.

McGregor wanted a way to off-load bandwidth-hogging updates and speed up access to other media-rich content. It wanted to expand digital learning without exceeding its 300Mbps threshold - to avoid not only higher monthly fees but also the extra cost of upgrading its content filter to handle higher throughput.

Since deploying CACHEBOX, complaints about slow video have vanished. Those problematic updates for apps and devices have been off-loaded from the internet connection, freeing up significant capacity for core learning content.

With large amounts of learning content being served locally - at LAN speeds - the classroom experience is much quicker. And with all that unused capacity available, anything still coming direct from the internet arrives faster too.

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.

Delano Joint Union High School District, CA

4 Schools | 4,235 Students
Rural | 1Gbps

In its first 6 months at Delano, CACHEBOX has met the majority of content demanded from local cache, not the internet. With an average of 87% of all requested content served from storage, internet usage has been dramatically slashed.

All that unused capacity means more room - for more content, more devices, whatever the district needs. For the cost of just over a month's bandwidth, Delano has extended the life of its current capacity as well as its network infrastructure - saving tens of thousands of dollars.

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.

Pyramid Lake Schools, NV

4 Schools | 4,235 Students
Rural | 1Gbps

Despite a 'per student' capacity of 1,388kbps - 13 times higher than the target set by the FCC - reliable web access couldn't be guaranteed.

By deploying CACHEBOX, the school has eliminated the biggest cause of the problem - enormous software update files for users' devices had been hogging bandwidth for most of the school day. Microsoft updates alone can account for as much as 71% of the school's entire traffic.

But in caching much of this content and serving it direct to devices, precious bandwidth is made available for the content that matters. Since deployment 12 months ago, Pyramid Lake has offloaded an average of 59% of all traffic to the cache, creating enough free capacity to satisfy all demand comfortably, including BYOD. And all at a fraction of the cost of another expensive bandwidth upgrade.

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

Clarksville ISD’s rural Texas location means bandwidth is expensive. Already paying more than $3k every month for 100Mbps, even a small increment will impact precious learning budget.

But with 620 Chromebook, iPad and PC users - and whole classes accessing the same web content simultaneously - demand often spikes way above capacity. This leads to congestion and slow network speeds, impacting learning.

Clarksville Independent School District, TX

3 Schools | 547 Students
Rural | 100Mbps

But for just 1/12th of the annual cost of bandwidth, CACHEBOX handles the district’s most popular content - by storing copies of it and serving it locally – so that repeat requests are taken off the WAN and delivered over the LAN.

CACHEBOX has postponed the need for more bandwidth - saving Clarksville from an annual increase in the 10s of $1000s.

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.

The Mary Louis Academy, NY

1 Academy | 740 Students
Suburban | 500Mbps | $3,505/month

With BYOD positively encouraged, and over 800 tablets and laptops regularly online, software updates were simply consuming too much bandwidth - despite having upgraded to a larger 500Mbps connection.

CACHEBOX uniquely caches updates from all platforms so devices get updated locally, without consuming bandwidth. For the Academy, results were instant - a faster web experience and no video buffering.

By regularly meeting up to 50% of Apple and 75% of Microsoft update demand, and ~40% of all online content, capacity is reclaimed for the content that matters.

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.

Des Moines Christian School (DMCS), IA

3 Schools | 840 Students
Suburban | 155Mbps

Aware that caching would ease that pressure, but not wanting to deploy and manage multiple solutions for the many different platforms, Jeremy needed something device-agnostic.

CACHEBOX is the only solution dedicated to whole-school caching, meaning it caches just about everything a school needs. With CACHEBOX, the district is able to cache updates from all software in use - Windows, Apple and iOS updates, Google, anti-virus and more - as well as core classroom content and bandwidth-intensive video.

CACHEBOX has cut bandwidth usage dramatically. Now these huge updates are delivered from cache, slashing internet use by 60-70% each month. Apple updates alone account for two thirds of all monthly traffic, but up 86% of these are now delivered locally, and at LAN speeds. In June 2018 CACHEBOX served 1.36TB of the district's total 1.86TB of data, leaving plenty of bandwidth for learning traffic as well as future growth.

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.

Franklin Area School District, PA

5 Schools | 1,880 Students
Rural | 300Mbps

But after discovering the only caching solution that can cache software updates from multiple operating systems, Franklin didn't need to consider upgrading bandwidth.

Franklin's network is regularly saturated with huge software updates from Avast and Windows. February saw 96.7TB of data requested but, with CACHEBOX installed, 95.7TB was served locally - meaning 99% of Franklin's 300Mbps stayed available for other content.

With content from cache averaging 66% of requests, the district can happily stay at 300Mbps. No need for an upgrade, even when planning 1:1 for the entire district.

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.

Arkadelphia School District, AR

5 Schools | 2,200 Students
Rural | 500Mbps

With a state contract, increasing bandwidth wasn’t an option for Arkadelphia and any additional volume may not have been enough to cater for peak demand anyway. But by deploying CACHEBOX the district tackles peak demand by serving repeat content locally.

With CACHEBOX, the district has slashed utilization of its internet link to just 80-200Mbps, with peaks not higher than 28Mbps. Meanwhile, CACHEBOX is serving over 300Mbps enabling the district to routinely serve more traffic than its state allocation, all without congestion.

Caching enables more devices to connect at TAFT

With web demand growing, Taft Independent upgraded bandwidth to ensure adequate connectivity. But with just 100 users accessing the web - the internet seemed slow and unresponsive.

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

TAFT Independent School District

3 Schools | 1,110 Students
Suburban | 400Mbps

With many more user devices scheduled to join the network, Taft was concerned things would only get worse. On a recommendation from neighboring district Nueces Canyon, Taft deployed CACHEBOX which revealed the main cause of congestion to be software update traffic.

With CACHEBOX in place the district was able to meet the vast majority of demand for these large files from local storage. Early 2018 saw just 7% of Microsoft and Windows traffic consume bandwidth – Terabytes of data that would previously have hogged available capacity and caused congestion. Instead, CACHEBOX was meeting an average of 75% of all classroom demand from local storage.

In 2019, with bandwidth costs dropping, Taft was able to double capacity to 400Mbps for the same monthly cost. But this doubling also came with a huge increase in user devices.

As school resumed after summer, more than 1000 devices now needed frequent access. But with CACHEBOX in place to keep offloading duplicate demand for software and learning content, the tidal wave of additional traffic failed to dent user experience.

Access to the learning content students needed remained smooth and fast. In that first quarter back at school, CACHEBOX actually increased caching performance. Now ~89.5% of Taft’s larger capacity remains available for the content that matters - videos and educational content continue to arrive faster.

Southwest Barry

Southwest Barry Community School District R5 pays $3k per month for its 80Mbps internet connection. That's $37.50 per Mbps to provide 100Kbps per student.

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

By deploying CACHEBOX, actual peak demand has been revealed. Requests for 275Mpbs of data have been reported during peak times with CACHEBOX serving 195Mbps on top of the 80Mbps from the district's connection.

Southwest Barry, MO

1 School | 800 Students
Rural | 80Mbps

The district's CACHEBOX cost little more than 1 months bandwidth and, by saving an average 40% bandwidth, it paid for itself in just a few months. More importantly, 275Mbps of effective capacity is now available to the school at a more sustainable price.

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

TAs teachers become more able and inclined to use online resources in class, a school’s bandwidth requirement inevitably grows. But continuously upgrading bandwidth to meet new demand is costly and often requires changes and additional cost across the network. School Districts like Technology Center of Du Page (TCDP) in Addison, Illinois use caching to handle growth more efficiently.

Technology Center Du Page, IL

1 School | 1,000 Students
Urban | 100Mbps

TCDP is a technical school with a 100Mbps connection and approximately 1,000 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.

"I haven't had to upgrade my bandwidth in 3 years! The CACHEBOX is a part of that."
Marek Adamczyk, Network Administrator, Technology Center Du Page

Big Horn offloads big files for big savings

Like many rural districts, Big Horn County Independent 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.

Big Horn, WY

3 Schools | 499 Students
Rural | 200Mbps

In addition to delivering more data per second than the connection alone would allow, caching has eliminated a common cause of congestion by offloading software update traffic.

The first month that CACHEBOX was in their network, 87% of Big Horn's Windows Updates were served from cache, clearing 1/3 of the district's entire traffic.

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.

Southeast Webster, MO

2 Schools | 600 Students
Rural | 100Mbps

In terms of cost-saving, the district pays $3000 per month for an 80Mbps internet connection.

By deploying caching it benefits from the equivalent of 275Mbps and, because the cost of CACHEBOX is less than a few month's bandwidth, the district pays a far more affordable price per Mbps.

Slow public bandwidth bypassed with high speed caching

Orient-Macksburg Community SD serves 160 students in rural Iowa. In expanding its online learning capabilities, Orient-Macksburg’s internet traffic started to overwhelm its 175Mbps capacity - resulting in slow, unresponsive classroom web access.

Orient Macksburg, IA

2 Schools | 161 Students
| 175Mbps

But, because it is provided by the state, with a bandwidth upgrade was impossible. The district needed another solution or it would have been forced to suspend web access during selected lessons until the state provided more capacity.

In turning to caching to serve content locally – be that learning content or large device and app software updates – the district has slashed demand on its internet link.

CACHEBOX now serves the majority of learning content locally – as much as 90% and higher. A single downloaded copy can meet multiple requests instantly, without consuming further bandwidth. With the internet free of congestion, there’s no need to postpone e-learning until the next upgrade. In fact, the district can do more – at much faster speeds.

By serving learning content locally, it reaches students at much faster LAN speeds – making a huge difference in the classroom. The user experience is lightning fast in comparison. Apex Learning - a core curricular platform that had been particularly unreliable - is now 14 times faster than from the internet. Other core learning content is up to 36 times faster!

"We can now use the online learning platforms the district purchases like Apex learning. We can live with what we have and not hear complaints. Since we had CACHEBOX, network software updates are not killing our speed. Biggest impact has been speed - in all aspects."
Andrew Rothe, IT Manager

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, with multiple online sessions taking place at the same time across the district’s classrooms, access speed still suffered.

Alcorn Schools, MS

4 Schools | 1,400 Students
Rural | 200Mbps

At an EdTech conference, the district was shown how caching instantly alleviates network demand helping whole classes of students access the same content simultaneously - a new norm in Alcorn's classrooms.

With CACHEBOX deployed, the instant speed increase and sudden availability of capacity was noticeable. Online tests flew by with no users anywhere on the network experiencing a problem. By offloading in-demand and bandwidth-heavy content to the cache and serving it locally, huge volumes of precious capacity are freed for other users.

Not just learning content but large software updates demanded by PCs and tablets are now served locally. In May 2018, 1.64TB of downloads for Microsoft updates alone were requested. However, CACHEBOX met 1.61TB of that demand from cache, so only 2% needed to come directly from the internet.

With CACHEBOX, Alcorn has consistently slashed demand on its bandwidth capacity - by as much as 82%. Since December 2017, an average of just 31% of its internet capacity has been needed - the majority is being served from cache.

Rural Ronan’s slow web speeds knocked right out the park

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 online 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.

Ronan SD No. 30, MT

4 Schools | 1,400 Students
Rural | 200Mbps

To cater for rising demand the FCC recommend Ronan upgrade capacity to 2Gbps - but such a fast connection would be too costly.

Instead, with CACHEBOX, Ronan has put their speed issues behind them, and without upgrading.

By meeting much of that high, concurrent demand from cache, core learning content is now delivered locally. And because it's served from within the LAN, it arrives at lightning LAN speeds. There's no more waiting, no more delays.

Content arrives at Mbps instead of kbps. Learning material, as well as problematic software updates, are accelerated even faster... 14x, 19x, even 30x faster!

And by reducing demand on its current internet link, that recommended bandwidth upgrade just isn't needed - Ronan can postpone this cost hike indefinitely.

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 spike to 2.4x the maximum bandwidth capacity. At peak times, the district needed 1.3Gbps - much of which was large operating system updates from Microsoft and Apple. With more demand than the network could handle, access to e-Learning and video content was slow.

Browning Public Schools, MT

9 Schools | 2,100 Students
Urban | 550Mbps

To fix the congestion problem, the district deployed a CACHEBOX420 and the appliance has since served over 50% of all web requests - offloading large duplicate software update traffic from the internet connection. In fact, CACHEBOX consistently keeps the district’s traffic below 500Mbps, avoiding the need for an expensive bandwidth upgrade.

It also enables the district to meet peak traffic demand without upgrading bandwidth. Including the modest cost of caching, Browning now gets significantly more affordable capacity and delivers faster access to online content in class.

How much of your internet bandwidth remains after software updates?

Claremont Unified School District's 1Gbps internet link handles its growing BYOD scheme for 7,000 students, 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 have regularly accounted for more than 50% of all data downloaded - counteracting the drive for more 1:1 learning.

Claremont USD, CA

10 Schools | 7,000 Students
Urban | 1Gbps

With CACHEBOX, Claremont has defeated the slow, problematic Apple updates that were hogging bandwidth. By storing Apple updates locally and serving them back at LAN speed, devices are updated much faster

With as much as 74% of Apple updates offloaded from the internet - and 66% of all content (1.6TB each month) - all that capacity is made available for more users and more educational content, enabling a more responsive learning experience.

Caching delivers more as usage increases

In 2016, El Dorado Springs introduced 1:1 to enable eLearning and improve student learning outcomes. But with hundreds of devices using its 60Mbps internet connection, large, duplicate software update files quickly saturated the link.

To postpone a bandwidth upgrade, the district turned to CACHEBOX. As soon as the caching appliance was deployed, those large bandwidth hogs were taken off the WAN, cached and served to students at LAN speeds – alleviating network congestion and creating more capacity for other education content.

El Dorado Springs, MO

3 Schools | 1,200 Students
Suburban | 500Mbps

CACHEBOX continues to serve as much as 96% of bandwidth-heavy content like huge, duplicate operating systems that are demanded by hundreds of student devices.

Rather than saturating the school's connection, Microsoft and Chromebook updates are offloaded - freeing up capacity to support even more learning content or devices.

900Mbps in classrooms with 100Mbps connection

Per-student bandwidth targets are a helpful tool for planning investment in connectivity. But purchasing more capacity isn’t the most cost-effective, reliable way to deliver the bandwidth you need. As Fredericktown Local found, caching represents the best value.

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.

Fredericktown Local, OH

3 Schools | 1,200 Students
Rural | 200Mbps

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.

Having deployed a CACHEBOX, it quickly delivered. Responsiveness in the classroom jumped as Fredericktown's effective capacity multiplied. With just its 100Mbps connection the district has been able to meet spikes in demand at almost 940Mbps - that’s essentially 9 times more capacity.

And with CACHEBOX discounted under E-rate, the district paid less than the cost of a single month's bandwidth. Fredericktown has effectively secured up to 797kbps per student capacity - smashing its target, while saving $000s of dollars each year.

By storing and serving in-demand content locally, CACHEBOX slashes school internet needs. There's no need for an upgrade just to meet short-lived peaks in demand.

Faster content from cache keeps Peoria’s students engaged

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

The tech team were right to expect problems. Once the 1:1 scheme launched, they quickly found huge spikes in concurrent demand would saturate the network. Occurring whenever whole classes of students accessed the same online material individually, but at the same time - throughout the school day.

East Peoria HSD, IL

1 School | 1,200 Students
Suburban | 300Mbps

Vital learning content including video became painfully slow to view, impacting student engagement. With teachers equally frustrated, learning was suffering, and future results from online PARCC testing were at risk.

The district had also specifically chosen Apex Learning content to manage their more challenging students who were difficult to engage and often harder to teach. Without fast, reliable access in the classroom their chances of graduating were deteriorating.

But, in deploying CACHEBOX, East Peoria students now access the content they need at lightning speeds. By serving content from local cache, including bandwidth-intensive video, internet demand is dramatically lowered - freeing up precious capacity. A single download meets multiple requests instantly, delivered at LAN speeds - making classroom access responsive and fast.

Abundant bandwidth still outpaced by caching

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

With no congestion, even hundreds of simultaneous classroom requests don’t cause queues for content. But despite having all that excess capacity, Snyder understood that not all content would arrive fast enough for the ideal user experience it sought. Only caching could serve its content faster.

Having deployed a CACHEBOX420 at the high school it quickly saw just how much faster. Content from domains that would previously have been delivered at 1Mbps are now reaching over 100Mbps.

Snyder ISD, TX

5 Schools | 2,679 Students
Rural | 1Gbps

A large proportion of the districts' traffic is related to the Anti-Virus software installed on its devices. Now these upgrades and updates are delivered as much as 150 times faster, ensuring that these large files clear the internet connection quickly.

CACHEBOX brings banned YouTube back to class

As Hannibal SD expanded e-learning across its 8 schools, it found its network regularly congested. With multiple users accessing bandwidth-heavy content such as video at the same time, and learning content arriving from particularly slow servers upstream, traffic would simply clog their internet link.

The result? A slow, often unusable service. With bandwidth maxed out, video would simply not load, apps wouldn't work, content would take forever to appear. Even during off-peak times the district found learning content still slow to arrive.

Hannibal SD, MO

8 Schools | 3,700 Students
Suburban | 300Mbps

With teachers and students frustrated, the district was forced to ban YouTube altogether - even though teachers were keen to use it.

Having realized that increasing bandwidth again and again was never going to solve the problems, Jonathan McCammon Technology Coordinator was excited to be shown CACHEBOX via his local schools' consortium. By storing popular content locally and streaming it direct to end-users from within the LAN, huge swathes of internet demand are offloaded, and any upstream web latency is avoided.

With CACHEBOX Hannibal has dramatically accelerated learning content - it's not just 2 or 3 times faster, but 15, 22 even 97 times faster!

And by slashing demand on its internet link, Hannibal has freed up lots of space for more bandwidth-hungry content such as YouTube videos. Teachers are delighted to include video in lesson plans again.

Brookfield lays the ground for enhanced e-Learning

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

Brookfield Christian School

1 School | 265 Students | Urban

With plans to expand the number of connected devices being used in school, Brookfield knew its existing internet connection was not up to speed. The computer lab was already quite slow, even when just half full. Like many smaller schools, the cost of a significant bandwidth upgrade was prohibitively high. And like districts across the US, they found that caching made far better economic sense.

Brookfield deployed a CACHEBOX210 to maximize bandwidth and accelerate their internet speed.

The first six months of use show it was a sound investment. The school has achieved an average Byte Hit Ratio (BHR) of 22% - peaking at 39% in November 2018. During this month the district saved significant bandwidth by caching software updates from Adobe, Microsoft, Google and Apple for its expanded fleet of devices.

Fast, free-flowing content at Black River Falls

In Wisconsin, Black River Falls district’s two Elementary Schools, Middle School and High School all rely on a shared 300Mbps connection for 1:1 learning.

However, with a growing number of devices connecting to the network and downloading software updates in the background, often sizeable, precious capacity was being ‘hijacked’. The result? Students and teachers faced frustrating delays when accessing educational resources and YouTube videos – often lasting throughout the school day.

School District of Black River Falls

5 Schools | 1,680 Students | Suburban | 300Mbps

With CACHEBOX, the district now makes much better use of its bandwidth - caching the majority of software updates locally, serving them out over the LAN instead. Updates now arrive at far higher LAN speeds, without using up bandwidth.

The results are impressive. For six consecutive months, Black River Falls offloaded an average of more than 50% of all internet traffic to local cache, including a peak of 82% in August.

Deeper analysis shows that, along with updates from Google, Apple and Microsoft, CACHEBOX is improving access to the school's e-Learning Management Systems (Sharp School and SMART Technologies).

With online content served directly over the school's LAN at faster speeds, instead of being downloaded from the Internet each time, students are learning far more effectively - without having to wait for web pages and videos to load.

Internet speeds flying at Airport

Airport Community SD in Michigan had a healthy 410Kbps per student. Yet the internet connection was proving too slow for 700+ concurrent users, causing YouTube videos to buffer. With more devices being added all the time, they deployed a web caching solution to free up bandwidth and increase web content speeds.

Airport CSD

8 Schools | 2,434 Students | Urban | 1Gbps

The district's existing firewall provider offered basic web caching, this would have required teachers to build YouTube playlists in advance. Not ideal for flexible, dynamic e-Learning. CACHEBOX310 gave them a more user-friendly solution, without that constraint.

SInce deployment in October 2017, the district has seen consistent BHR rates of over 25%, peaking at nearly 80% in December. That's hundreds of GBs of data now being served locally from CACHEBOX every month

And because that content is served directly over the school's LAN - without needing to access the internet connection - students have gained much faster access to e-Learning content. At times, content is accessed 9 times faster than from the Internet.

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.

Brandon School District

8 Schools | 2,824 Students | Suburban | 10Gbps

The school chose a CACHEBOX420 to tackle its bandwidth hogs and increase browsing speed. Since deployment in October 2017, the results show a consistently high BHR of 45-70%, plus significant bandwidth savings on software updates from Windows (63%), Apple (72%), Google (85%) and Adobe (66%). As a result, the average speed of Internet requests has increased by 1-2 times - providing students and staff with faster access to digital content in the classroom.

Trinity School slashes peaks

The introduction of additional student devices puts pressure on existing internet connections. But, as the tech director at Trinity School could see, growth in demand would continue to grow long after the devices are first deployed. Like other districts, Trinity School needed a long-term solution.

Trinity introduced an independent learning scheme in 2016 to help stimulate student engagement and improve learning outcomes. However, upon launch, students found the internet slow and unresponsive, threatening the engagement levels the school was hoping for, and lesson plans suffered.

Trinity School, Maryland

1 School | 400 Students | Suburban | 50Mbps

The combination of the instant increase in individual users generated by a move to 1:1, together with their need to simultaneously access the same content during lessons, had caused huge spikes in demand.

The school’s 50Mbps internet connection simply could not handle additional web traffic created in class and was further congested by software updates as devices – in their hundreds – also began to simultaneously download large update files.

Now, CACHEBOX is delivering up to 350Mbps of content to students whilst the school's internet connection 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.

"Without CACHEBOX there is no way I would have been able to add all these devices and start our iPad programme!"
David Godfrey, Tech Director, Trinity School

Faster content, by an order of magnitude

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 9 schools it chose to upgrade bandwidth to 1Gbps to ensure capacity. That equated to 175kbps per student, nearly double the FCC 2016 ‘capacity per student’ target. However, in daily use, it still found content was too slow in the classroom, including core lesson content. One particular favorite - CoolMath - was not responsive enough to be an effective learning tool.

Laurens County SD55, SC

9 Schools | 5,718 Students |
Rural | 1Gbps

Turning to CACHEBOX, Laurens was soon serving content more than 10 times faster on average, than content from the Internet.

The ‘TCP hits’, i.e. the data served from cache, was delivered at over 900Kbps. ‘TCP misses’ show data from the internet could only average 87 Kbps over the same period.

At the level of individual domains, specific content is being served at much higher speeds. Readingeggs is an online repository of reading activities, and the increase in delivery speed of data served from cache is over 800 times faster!

North Ottawa

When bandwidth is prohibitively expensive, caching is a financial no-brainer. But even if connectivity prices fall dramatically, the evidence from North Ottawa shows that caching is an essential tool for delivering fast classroom connectivity.

In rural Kansas, North Ottawa County's 600 students relied on 100Mbps to access learning content at a cost of $1,475 every month.

But with CACHEBOX, an average of 69% of all district content was delivered locally from cache storage. Users needed to access the internet link for just 31% of requests. The district effectively satisfied demand with just 50Mbps capacity and could have saved around $9000 per year.

North Ottawa County, KS

2 Schools | 641 Students |
Rural | 100Mbps

A few years on and North Ottawa decided to upgrade bandwidth as part of a wider 1:1 initiative. Thanks to lower costs a giant leap to 1Gbps was feasible and the district chose to upgrade its CACHEBOX to handle this higher throughput. Why? North Ottawa had seen first hand CACHEBOX's ability to serve content at LAN speed regardless of the availability of upstream bandwidth.

Only CACHEBOX can guarantee that education content reaches students faster.

Sioux Central eliminates start-of-lesson peaks

Peak demand at the start of lessons meant Sioux Central Community SD internet link was often congested and painfully slow to use. Teachers reported that 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.

Sioux Central, IA

3 Schools | 619 Students |
Rural | 1Gbps

After CACHEBOX - demand could be seen peaking at over 140Mbps at the start of each lesson. On occasion it would rise to nearly 200Mbps - this is the bandwidth capacity that Sioux Central required in order to avoid congestion altogether. CACHEBOX provided this extra capacity at the times it was most needed.

Equitably faster online learning county-wide

Because of its huge geographic span, 220 of Miami-Dade's schools are remote, with typically smaller rural Internet connections.

For many rural students access to the district's online learning platform was so slow they were waiting as long as 30 seconds for a page to load. Constant traffic congestion from duplicate learning requests would see lost learning time rapidly reach many minutes in just a single lesson - putting those students at a disadvantage to those with access to larger connections.

Miami Dade, FL

462 Schools | 322,601 Students | Suburban | 30Gbps

After installing CACHEBOXes, Miami-Dade found 97% of requests for learning content now being served from cache. With that content being served locally - at LAN speeds - load times were drastically slashed.

A classroom of 30 students used to waiting 30 seconds for a page to load saw that drop to just 2.45 seconds.

In serving the vast majority of content from cache, congestion has been eliminated - freeing up precious bandwidth - enabling the 3% of dynamic content not served from cache to also load much faster.

Miami-Dade's results show how caching can help provide equitable access to accelerated e-learning in remote schools.

Learning platform without caching: 30 requests * 1 second for each = 30 seconds load time.

Learning platform with CACHEBOX: 29 requests at 0.050 seconds each + 1 uncacheable file at 1 second = 2.45 seconds load time.

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.

Oak Grove District RIV

4 Schools | 1,965 Students | Suburban | 1Gbps

This means that the school could achieve the same classroom internet performance with a smaller internet connection. With a monthly bandwidth bill of over $4k, the school could save approximately $20k per year and better handle traffic growth between bandwidth upgrades.

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.

Durant CSD

3 Schools | 673 Students |
Rural | 85Mbps

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

Setting per-student bandwidth targets is a smart way to plan bandwidth requirements. But meeting your targets shouldn’t be a question of simply purchasing additional capacity. Caching will enable you to deliver target capacity reliably and cost-effectively.

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.

Woodland School District 50

4 Schools | 6,190 Students | Suburban | 250Mbps

Woodland's CACHEBOX solution costs $7450, with expected lifecycle c. 5 years.

Additional 360Mbps to reach FCC target: $21,912* per annum for bandwidth that is needed half a dozen times per month. CACHEBOX pays for itself in 4 months and saves the district and FCC over $100k in its full lifecycle!

Highland's students get faster priority classroom content

In Highland Local's rural setting, it would need to spend a very high portion of its technology budget on bandwidth to obtain the high speeds seen at other, urban schools. Fortunately CACHEBOX offers a smarter way to guarantee fast content to students.

By storing content locally and serving it from within the LAN, Highland Local avoids the potential causes of slow content like network congestion or a content providers' slow web server.

Highland Local Schools, Ohio

3 Schools | 1,790 Students |
Rural | 100Mbps

Core online education content from sites like Starfall, ABCya!, storylineonline, roomrecess, and mathplayground is delivered between 20 and 40 times faster from CACHEBOX than directly from the web.

CACHEBOX outruns 10Gbps bandwidth

With a student population of approximately 30,000, Anaheim is one of the largest school districts in California, with Internet throughput to match. But as an urban district, Anaheim has access to cheaper bandwidth - they pay the same price for 10Gbps that a rural Texan district pays for 50Mbps.

That puts Anaheim's bandwidth capacity per student way above average - so students shouldn't suffer the effects of network congestion. However, even at 400Kbps per student (4 times the FCC's 2016 target for schools), Anaheim's students still find web content arrives at sub-optimal speeds.

Anaheim Union High School District

20 Schools | 30,222 Students | Urban | 10Gbps

The download speeds table shows classroom content from the internet arriving at vastly slower speeds than the network can handle. This can be due to any number of issues upstream and beyond a schools control.

But with CACHEBOX latency is never an issue. Content is served from local cache, at LAN speeds – and that can be many, many times faster than from the internet.

  • 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

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

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.

Glenbard High School District, Caching

4 Schools | 8,303 Students | Suburban | 4Gbps

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.

The district wanted to implement a Bring Your Own Device scheme but needed to ensure that congestion would not cause slow internet, damaging student engagement in class. Pickens County consulted with neighboring school district Laurens County and, impressed with their bandwidth saving solution - CACHEBOX - deployed their own.

Pickens County School District

23 Schools | 16,202 Students | Suburban | 2Gbps

With CACHEBOX, Pickens is able to support over 7,700 devices on its 2Gbps bandwidth link, including student and staff laptops, desktops and interactive Promethean boards. BYOD has been fully enabled without congestion, and rather than delays in content delivery, speed in the classroom has increased.

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.

And because that content is served at LAN speeds, delivery in the classroom has been accelerated up to 600 times faster than delivery from the internet.

Bandwidth ≠ speed

Having paid out for extra bandwidth capacity that put them well above the FCC bandwidth target, Westwood CSD's 250kbps per student was meant to provide fast access to learning content and support advanced internet-enabled learning techniques like blended learning.

But that $36k per annum investment doesn't always deliver the speedy web access required for students to fully benefit. That's because bandwidth is just one of the many factors that influence the speed of access to content.

Westwood CSD

2 Schools | 520 Students
Rural | 150Mbps

From a slow web server upstream to handshake issues and physical transmission – many things can slow down delivery - each one beyond a school’s control. Each download is affected - multiply that by a whole class accessing the same content and the problem magnifies. But, they can be avoided.

By storing content locally with CACHEBOX and serving it from within the LAN, Westwood sidesteps these causes of slow content.

We can see the impact of this in Westwood's caching reports. Despite having ample bandwidth, the PBSkids content that comes directly from the internet averages just 62kbps. Whereas the content served from cache is delivered at 541kbps, 5 times faster.

Some sites show more dramatic peak speed increases, highlighting just how much external factors can slow content - and the fact that simply upgrading bandwidth can’t improve it.

At Westwood, up to 53% of all requested content is now served locally from cache. Taking the lowest month for cached content (40% in Nov 2017) as the annual average reduction in bandwidth need across a full year, Westwood could have saved significantly on its $20 per Mbps monthly cost, and still achieve the fast classroom content it wanted.

Offsetting 40% of bandwidth per month represents a significant annual saving:

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

Potential annual bandwidth cost saving @40% average = $14,486

Total saving ($72,432) - cost of caching ($7,000) = $65,432 pa

Start-of-lesson peaks eliminated

St Johns is a large district of over 32,000 students in 39 schools spread across Florida. In reaching the FCC's 2016 connectivity target of 100Kbps per student, the district was forced to use significant budget. That meant the next target of 1Mbps per student by 2018 was simply unrealistic, even with E-rate support - however the district feared its student e-learning experience would suffer as a result.

Fortunately, using a combination of existing capacity and caching appliances, the district is able to deliver content at high speed far more cost-effectively.

St Johns SD

39 Schools | 32,643 Students | Suburban | 4Gbps

With CACHEBOX deployed, the majority of content is accelerated. Web content served locally from CACHEBOX is consistently many times faster than content served directly from the web.

St John's caching report for May 2017 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 snappier browser experience - with less waiting for pages to load and more time to answer questions. With student engagement fully optimized, St Johns’ accumulated saving in browser wait amounts to days of potentially lost teaching and learning time over the school year.

1:1 scheme enabled for Nueces Canyon

If your district plans to implement 1:1 or introduce new content and learning platforms, you need to make sure that you have enough internet capacity to cope with increased demand. As Nueces Canyon found, there are smarter options than simply upgrading bandwidth.

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.

Nueces Canyon CISD

2 Schools | 300 Students |
Rural | 45Mbps

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

Large school districts invest thousands of dollars catering for peak demand. You may feel that your district has sufficient bandwidth to ensure fast web access in classrooms. But, like St. Paul Public School District, closer inspection will reveal localised problems that only caching can resolve.

With 72,000 students to serve, St. Paul Public School District spends over a quarter million dollars on bandwidth every year. This investment delivers an average 500Kbps per student but the district still found congestion was hindering web access at various sites. At some schools, a 1Gbps link to the district's WAN was a bottleneck that limited internet access speeds.

The district deployed CACHEBOX to level the playing field by taking traffic off the WAN links, eliminating congestion at peak times.

Saint Paul Public School District

72 Schools | 37,000 Students | Urban | 21Gbps

By serving content from cache, the district instantly alleviates peak utilisation of the previously strained 1Gbps WAN link, serving 80% of traffic directly from within each school's network.CACHEBOX has eliminated congestion, leaving only 100-200Mbps for the WAN to handle.

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.

Westwood CSD

2 Schools | 520 Students
Rural | 150Mbps

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

Despite having a healthy 160kbps per student, bandwidth at North Palos was often saturated, with half the district's users regularly needing 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 an in-contract upgrade to a higher capacity connection would be extremely high, even with E-rate funding.

North Palos District 117

5 Schools | 3329 Students
Suburban | 1.25Gbps

With teachers unable to conduct lessons effectively, the Tech team planned to ban 1:1 content altogether. Fortunately, the team looked into web caching.

After deploying CACHEBOX, 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.

Acceleration in the classroom has seen prime education content from google, ABCya!, starfall, adaptedmind and more, arrive 50, 100 and even 333 times faster!

The offload in traffic has been instant. With over half of overall content now served from cache, the district has freed up capacity for other content or for even more users.

Caching has effectively doubled existing bandwidth capacity. North Palos now has the fast, reliable service it needed, without needing to ban content or pay for an expensive 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. The evidence from Newcomerstown illustrates how caching gives schools the fast web access they expected to get from bandwidth.

Newcomerstown

4 Schools | 961 Students
Suburban | 200Mbps

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, more capacity is made available for other devices or 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.

Calexico

1 Schools | 300 Students
Suburban | 50Mbps

A bandwidth upgrade seems like the best way to clear internet congestion but, as Calexico found, it's far more effective to augment bandwidth upgrades with caching in terms of both cost and performance.

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.

Los Lunas offloads over 80% of bandwidth demand

In suburban New Mexico, Los Lunas School District delivers e-Learning to ~8,500 students in 15 campuses with 100Mbps links for the majority of its schools. Yet, during peak times, demand peaks at 500Mbps leading to slow speeds caused by TB’s of downloads from Anti-Virus, Windows and Apple updates.

Los Lunas SD

15 Schools | 8,511 Students
Suburban | 100Mbps

With plans of implementing 1:1, 6 x more devices were expected to be introduced in 2019. The situation raised concerns about the sheer increase in volume of network traffic and the consequent strain on bandwidth.

Having previous experience with Apple Cache, the district aimed for a caching solution that could handle much more network traffic and provide usage visibility.

In deploying CACHEBOX, all those problematic Anti-Virus, Windows and Apple updates are now cached, and that means devices get updated locally – at faster LAN speeds.

In 2019, after Los Lunas upgraded the connectivity to 10Gbps at each school, CACHEBOX performance increased – saving an average of 80% bandwidth month to month. And with detailed monthly caching reports, management has full visibility over traffic.

CACHEBOX is handling 67% of total network traffic

Conemaugh Township, located in rural Pennsylvania, serves almost 1,000 students across two school sites. In 2018, its 200Mbps connection was struggling to handle ~500 devices.

At peak times, the network would saturate from gigabytes of Windows updates traffic which resulted in slow speeds and a poor user experience across the district.

Conemaugh Township SD

3 Schools | 967 Students
Rural | 1Gbps

With the district implementing 1:1 and expecting a threefold increase in network devices, it planned a bandwidth upgrade, but that was scheduled in a few years’ time. It needed a solution now.

CACHEBOX is the ideal fix – not just for now, but for future traffic growth. By deploying CACHEBOX, the district instantly benefited from average bandwidth savings of up to 53% in the first months.

But in 2019, when Conemaugh finally upgraded bandwidth to 1Gbps, CACHEBOX is performing even better - caching 67% of the total network traffic. And because large files like Microsoft updates are delivered to users locally, at LAN speeds – they often arrive 85 times faster than from the internet.

By offloading such huge amounts of software updates traffic from its network, CACHEBOX is facilitating e-Learning at Conemaugh, ensuring its students get faster access to critical online content.

5 times more devices on just double the bandwidth? You can with CACHEBOX!

With just 200 iPads accessing the internet, Esko’s internet link would regularly congest – slowing down access in the classroom. So with a roll-out of 1:1 district-wide planned over the summer, it knew it needed to increase capacity.

But with device numbers set to multiply by more than 5 times, Esko feared its planned upgrade of twice current capacity wouldn’t be enough – risking the success of its learning initiative.

Esko SD99, MN

4 Schools | 1,281 Students
Suburban | 100Mbps

Luckily for Esko, its Technology Coordinator received a timely email about K-12 caching. Impressed by CACHEBOX data from other schools, especially Miami-Dade who had faced a similar problem – the district rapidly followed suit, persuaded by its value for money and long term returns.

When the time came, CACHEBOX helped the district transition to full independent learning without a hitch. Despite over 1,200 devices needing access to online content, CACHEBOX meets the majority of requests from cache.

By serving content locally, Esko is able to satisfy simultaneous spikes in demand far higher than its connection would allow, effectively multiplying its capacity. As independent learning accelerated, Esko could rely on CACHEBOX to boost its existing capacity – often by more than triple.

"We currently have a CACHEBOX and could not be happier. Thank you!"
Angie Orvedahl, Technology Coordinator

Stop Windows updates blocking web access – without upgrading

With just 138 devices accessing its 27Mbps internet connection, Queen of the Rosary often found its classroom user experience slow. Analysis showed that Windows software updates were regularly saturating the network.

With the addition of 200 more devices planned, things were only going to worsen. But with budget going on the new devices, the school needed to avoid extra monthly costs for more bandwidth.

Queen of the Rosary School, IL

1 School | 300+ Students
Suburban | 27Mbps

Having seen the impact of CACHEBOX in Sioux Central, Iowa - a similar-sized school - it opted to let caching take the strain and keep spend to a minimum.

Once deployed, the change was instant.

CACHEBOX is offloading up to 73% of Windows downloads from the school’s connection – as well as updates from Avast, Office, Mozilla and others. In meeting demand locally, without devices needing to access the internet, demand has been slashed.

And, with updates being served direct to users’ devices at much faster LAN speeds, they clear the network many times faster. So the district can free up even more bandwidth for core learning content and those extra devices when they arrive.

A cast-iron solution for slow content.

Students at Dartmouth frequently access education content from Google, Apple and YouTube – but the user experience in the classroom was too slow.

Long wait-times as well as video buffering for Google, Apple and YouTube content was impacting learning. With the tech team receiving regular complaints from Teachers, they needed a cast-iron solution for the classroom.

With 6 schools, over 3,600 students and a rising number of 1:1 devices to cater for, Dartmouth turned to CACHEBOX. Only caching can guarantee web content avoids the causes of latency, and only CACHEBOX caches everything a school needs.

Dartmouth School District, MA

6 Schools | 3,655 Students
Suburban | 1Gbps

Results at Dartmouth are better than textbook. Over the first six months of 2019, the district consistently served the vast majority of content from local cache - averaging an impressive 64% of total demand.

By meeting more demand locally, at much faster LAN speeds, Dartmouth has accelerated not just learning content, but problematic software updates too.

Video viewing vastly improved

Cambridge-Isanti Schools has a 500Mbps fibre connection for fast, equitable e-Learning across its seven schools. While this is above the FCC’s ‘per student’ kbps target, it was not meeting demand at the start of lessons. Content was slow to load, especially videos.

Upgrading bandwidth was out of the question due to high rural costs. Other web caching vendors were offering multi-purpose devices, loaded with unnecessary features. CACHEBOX presented an affordable, schools-focused cache as an alternative to both.

Cambridge-Isanti Public Schools, MN

7 Schools | 5,000 Students
Rural | 500Mbps

Cambridge Isanti Schools has now deployed five CACHEBOX appliances across its five sites, which are optimising bandwidth use and accelerating classroom content – with particularly impressive results for video.

In March, there was close to 1TB of video traffic requested from Google Video and YouTube, but only 10% of that had to be downloaded from the Internet. The vast majority was served from CACHEBOX, at high-speed over the school’s LAN.

More bang for your buck

With its relatively small bandwidth allocation set via a local purchase consortia in rural Arkansas, Guy-Perkins secured connectivity affordably. But with plans to roll-out 1:1, it knew the extra Chromebook traffic would surge beyond current capacity.

Reviewing the options for delivering affordable, cost-effective web access, it opted for a caching solution – discounted through E-rate. Seeking the maximum benefits possible, the district looked at CACHEBOX – the only fit-for-purpose schools’ cache. Seeing the great results from CACHEBOX at neighboring Arkansas school, Quitman made the final decision a no-brainer.

Guy-Perkins School District, AR

2 Schools | 392 Students
Rural | 150Mbps

Because CACHEBOX caches more content than any other solution - results have been better than hoped. Deployed during the summer, CACHEBOX was on-hand to instantly minimize bandwidth usage the moment classes full of Chromebooks resumed.

With just 46% of classroom traffic needing to access the internet, Guy-Perkins has more than halved demand – leaving plenty of room for more devices and traffic as 1:1 rolls out – all without increasing its bandwidth allocation.

Maintain more than enough web access – it’s far less than you think

As Hampton-Dumont expanded its e-Learning curriculum and moved towards full 1:1, it feared web demand would cripple its network, requiring regular, high-priced bandwidth upgrades.

For 2018 the FCC advised a 2Gbps connection. Instead, despite learning content and device update traffic spiralling as expected, it chose caching as the ‘best-fit’ solution.

Hampton-Dumont Community Schools, IA

4 Schools | 1,253 Students
Suburban | 400Mbps

Despite downloads more than tripling from under 1TB to just over 3TB, CACHEBOX continually serves up to 90% of this locally – leaving most of the district’s connection unused, every day.

By relying on CACHEBOX to deliver the extra capacity needed, it has given the district room to expand content and user numbers for years to come - on just 500Mbps. Hampton-Dumont’s plans for future upgrades are now far less than other schools.

Cache far more content with less effort

Thanks to the strong hands-on skills and ‘roll your own’ approach of Network Administrator Weston George, Monett has benefited from a home-grown set-up that offered some caching of web content.

However, DIY setups are very labor-intensive - require a lot of effort – and they don’t cache online video, more complex content or software updates.

So when Monett bought Mac Minis, it also implemented Apple Caching. But this only cached iOS content, and was yet another thing for Weston to juggle – on top of traffic shaping, system admin and other server updates.

Monett School R1 District, MO

5 Schools | 2,249 Students
Urban | 2Gbps

Seeing how much effort was needed to manage classroom demand for limited reward, neighboring school Webb City recommended CACHEBOX. A specialized appliance for schools caching, it not only makes caching easy to manage, it caches everything schools need: software updates from all vendors, all manner of learning content, online video, and HTTPS content – acknowledged as being uncacheable by many.

After seeing the results at Webb City and a demo matched to its needs, Monett deployed its own CACHEBOX and was delighted to see instant bandwidth savings.

Weston was especially delighted with the ‘at-a-glance’ and detailed reporting - something DIY solutions or Apple caching don’t offer.

"I am seeing anywhere from 30%-50% bandwidth savings according to the reports", says Weston. "Gotta say, I am kind of addicted to the reporting in there. It is really slick!"

E-Rate funded caching revitalizes slow 1:1 on 1Gbps

Spring Cove SD run comprehensive e-Learning programs including Odysseyware for personalized 1:1 instruction. But despite a substantial 1Gbps internet link, its 2,000+ users at 3 sites connect via WAN connections of just 200Mbps.

When whole classes are instructed to access the same material during lessons, the spikes in simultaneous traffic overwhelm the WAN links – resulting in frustrating delays in the classroom. With longer page-load times and content constantly buffering, student disengagement was rising steeply.

Spring Cove School District, PA

4 Schools | 2,013 Students
Rural | 1Gbps

Its Windows and Apple-based learning devices were also downloading operating software updates, only magnifying the problem – often jamming the network all day long. Learning was at risk.

Having seen direct funding support for caching in E-rate, Spring Cove successfully applied - selecting the US schools market leader, CACHEBOX. Since deployment, the classroom experience has been invigorated.

By meeting more than 50% of classroom demand (and as much as 99% of software updates) from local cache storage, the pressure on WAN connections has vanished. And more, in serving that content locally over the LAN, it’s delivered many times faster than from the web. Core learning content from netexam.com, study.com, xtramath.org is now around 50 times faster. Learning videos are often 120 times faster - but educational gaming content reaches over 300 times faster!

Hidden software updates are hindering classroom access

When Bozeman SD in Montana noticed a slowdown in the classroom, and load times increased, it assumed it’s independent learning traffic was to blame.

With 6,000 devices - an even split of ChromeBooks and Apple Macs - in daily use across its 11 campuses, Bozeman’s bandwidth was being squeezed.

Bozeman SD 7, MT

11 Schools | 6,755 Students
Urban| 2Gbps

With classroom access to online learning content continuing to slow, Bozeman applied for E-rate funding for caching. Wanting to cache certain learning content from specific domains, the district hoped to offset demand by meeting it locally.

But in deploying CACHEBOX – the only schools-dedicated cache that caches everything a school needs – Bozeman found it could offload a surprising 86% of total demand to local cache.

And when it looked closer, Bozeman discovered CACHEBOX was offloading nearly 8TB of demand – the vast majority of which was for software updates. With Google and Apple updates accounting for 73% of all downloads, it had uncovered the real culprit.

But thanks to CACHEBOX, almost 100% of ChromeBook updates and 91% of Apple were served from cache.

With so much free capacity, longer term plans for more bandwidth for more devices can be suspended.

Reclaiming precious bandwidth from updates

Located in rural New Jersey, Washington Township School District caters for its 425 students and 90 staff members with a 200Mbps connection.

With e-Learning at the heart of student activities, the district invested in a MacBook 1:1 scheme and more online content – including online videos (YouTube/Vimeo), state testing, and various educational device applications and management systems for teachers.

Washington Township, NJ

2 Schools | 425 Students
Rural| 200Mbps

However, with the rapid introduction of more classroom devices and online resources, Washington Township’s internet link struggled to keep up peak demand. The resulting congestion led to slow e-Learning access, frustrating students and teachers. With more growth expected in the coming years, the situation would only worsen - risking the district’s investment in technology.

The district chose CACHEBOX to tackle its bandwidth hogs and improve the internet experience. Since deployment in August 2019, the district has revealed bandwidth savings of 93% on total network traffic, consistently offloading multi-gigabytes of Apple, Microsoft, Windows and Edge Suite software updates.

As a result, the average speed of Internet requests has increased by up to 10 times for some domains – speeding up access to the online classroom content that matters the most.

Having worked with various caching solutions in the past, including Squid and Apple cache, Systems Integrator, Micheal Miller, is very pleased with CACHEBOX: "It’s truly a unique product. I would recommend it to all districts, especially the ones with small bandwidth purchasing power looking to make the most of their resources, while gaining in all areas of their network. CACHEBOX enlightened me of the power of this technology in school networks!"

Stopping the veiled 1:1 bandwidth menace

Despite an impressive near-1Mbps ‘per student’ capacity - in line with its FCC target - Windber Area’s network would grind to a halt. At peak times classroom demand would overwhelm its internet link, causing a dramatic slowdown as requests queued and students were forced to wait for content to download.

With morning announcements delivered via its YouTube channel, the simultaneous rush to view was saturating capacity. But having started rolling out 1:1 learning to its schools, congestion was now re-occurring throughout the day.

Windber Area SD

3 Schools | 1,607 Students
Urban| 1Gbps

1Gbps for 1,600 students had seemed sufficient, but as additional Chromebook and laptop numbers grew, so did demand for even more duplicate content. And not just video and learning content - each new device was demanding its own software update. The very same large multi-gigabyte files would be repeatedly downloaded.

And with slow web servers the norm for software updates, this would see files trickle down Windber’s internet connection all day long, consuming all its bandwidth. The district tried to stagger device uploads by blocking domains at certain times of the day, but with 1:1 planned for every school, it needed a better solution.

Having seen CACHEBOX perform so well while working at neighboring district Richmond, Tech Director Frank Tallyen used E-Rate funds to secure Windber’s own appliance. Deployed over the summer, results were immediate.

CACHEBOX met over 50% of all content demanded - but ‘updates’ performance was even better. As much as 85.9% of device demand was offloaded. And because cached content is served directly over the LAN it arrives at much faster LAN speeds, and clears the network quickly, leaving students with more premium congestion-free e-learning experience.

Stopping congestion from 000’s of device updates

Lakewood City, a large suburb of Cleveland Ohio, has access to high speed internet via a city-wide dark fibre consortia. Thanks to a portion made available to public institutions, the district enjoys affordable connectivity, however allocation is contracted over long periods.

Lakewood has committed to “bringing a myriad of digital resources to the fingertips of teachers and students across K-12”, but with 5,562 users regularly accessing online content, the network has been slowing down.

Lakewood City SD, OH

10 Schools | 5,222 Students
Urban| 1Gbps

Unfortunately, software updates for the many Apple and Windows devices in use have been getting more frequent and larger in size. With capacity consumed by updates, there’s often been no room for learning content – and worse, the congestion has lasted throughout the day.

Lakewood needed to relieve the pressure, but its current contract had over a year left to run. It needed to find another way to bring back speedy access in the classroom.

Deploying a high capacity CACHEBOX420 has enabled Lakewood to offload masses of demand content, storing and serving it locally instead – including updates for all devices.

In just its first full month of operation in November 2019, CACHEBOX offloaded 92% of the district’s total updates – including 97.8% of Microsoft, 95.2% of Apple, and 90% of Chromebook.

Of the 6.9 terabytes of total content requested from right across the district, CACHEBOX served 60%, effectively multiplying existing bandwidth, and enabling a faster, more responsive classroom experience.

1:1 web traffic slashed, room for growth - without the admin headache

With 1,300+ students across its high, middle and elementary schools on a single campus, but low student and teacher device numbers, Galax City relied on a single 150Mbps internet connection. But with plans to expand 1:1 across the district, as well as hosting a guest network, the district recognised traffic would grow, likely resulting in congestion and slow access to learning content in the classroom.

Galax City SD, VA

3 Schools | 1,332 Students
Suburban | 500Mbps

A planned upgrade to 500Mbps would help, but Technology Coordinator Matthew Cornett wanted stronger guarantees of fast, responsive web access. With staffing changes resulting in under-resourcing, he also wanted to avoid the headache of constant network administration whilst single-handedly rolling out the new devices.

With CACHEBOX promising maximum caching performance with the minimum fuss, Matthew was pleased to discover it would handle demand from the various devices in use across the district – including Chromebooks, Windows and Apple.

After a smooth deployment, Matthew was delighted by the results. CACHEBOX was handling demand even concurrent access from his growing number of devices couldn’t phase.

As devices rose to outnumber users and concurrent access averaged 1,500 students at any one time, Galax City took advantage of lower bandwidth costs and upgraded its 150Mbps link to 500Mbps.

But latest caching performance reports show CACHEBOX offloading so much data, only 133Mbps is being used. In the first semester of the 2019/20 school year, CACHEBOX served so much content locally, an average of 73.3% capacity remained unused.



“CACHEBOX simply does its job without me ever having to think about it. We haven't had any complaints from teachers for the past 3 years because the web pages are so fast. This product is definitely serving us well.”
Matthew Cornett, Technology Coordinator

74% bandwidth saved after software updates

Riverside USD caters for over 600 students in two campuses across suburban Elwood, Kansas. Running a full 1:1 e-Learning program and Learning Management Systems (LMS) with HTTPS content means fast access is critical.

Despite a seemingly sufficient 1Gbps connection, Riverside often struggles to handle ~800 devices operating on different platforms, when connected concurrently.

Riverside Unified School District 114

4 Schools | 649 Students
Suburban | 1Gbps

Throughout the day, school traffic is made of duplicate requests that soon saturate the network. Bandwidth-hungry update files for Apple, Windows and Chrome cause network congestion and slow speeds, while at peak times concurrent access worsen the user experience. Consequently, the quality of lessons in class is jeopardised.

But instead of paying out for more costly bandwidth to overcome demand, Riverside invested in CACHEBOX – the ideal fit-for-purpose caching appliance that stores and serves popular schools’ content locally.

With an average of 74% of content served locally, the district offloads gigabytes of traffic demand, especially from software updates. CACHEBOX’s HTTPS caching functionality allows Riverside to intercept and cache Chrome updates, YouTube and Acellus content.

As a result, devices at Riverside receive almost all updates locally, at much faster LAN speeds. Precious bandwidth is liberated, releasing further network capacity. Students now enjoy a faster, more responsive learning experience.

“The appliance has enhanced our end user experience.”
Leslie Rullman, Technology Coordinator

Only one cache is dedicated to schools

Worth School District caters for over 1,100 students in 4 schools across 3 campuses in the village of Worth in the southern Chicago suburbs. Its drive towards independent 1:1 learning has seen all students equipped with personal Google Chromebooks.

But with more than 1,300 users accessing Worth’s 500Mbps connection on Chromebooks, MacBooks and PCs, congestion had become a problem, causing slow web access in the classroom. Students were struggling to use online content in lessons, video would often stall, and worse, online assessment with PARCC was being put at risk.

Worth SD 127, IL

4 Schools | 1,144 Students
Suburban | 500Mbps

Aware that caching was directly supported via E-rate, the district applied for funding, hoping an Apple Cache would help. Luckily a proposal for CACHEBOX helped the district realise that caching only iOS updates and Apple material would have no impact on the content that really mattered.

With CACHEBOX able to cache everything a school needs, including Chromebook content and PARCC testing – as well as any updates for Teachers’ MacBooks - Worth was quickly convinced it was the best solution for the job. Impressed by unbeatable investment returns and scalability to handle future traffic growth, the district deployed a CACHEBOX at each of its 3 sites.

Worth was delighted by CACHEBOX’s instant results. All 3 appliances serve an average of well over 60% of all in-demand content locally, including HTTPS content and bandwidth-heavy video, as well as software updates for all devices in use.

Network liberated from software updates

Vernon Parish in rural Louisiana recently introduced a 1:1 scheme across its 16 campuses. Despite a 10Gbps connection for its 9,000 Chromebooks, Macbooks and PCs, the user experience was far from ideal.

With Louisiana’s curriculum primarily web-based, students and teachers needed access to media-rich content like video and state testing content, but with many 000s of devices accessing learning content concurrently, the district experienced a dramatic slowdown in web access. With long page-load times and buffering of YouTube videos, the quality of lessons was being jeopardised.

Vernon Parish School Board, LA

18 Schools | 8,882 Students
Town Locale | 10Gbps

After lengthy analysis, the district discovered that software updates consuming terabytes of bandwidth were causing network congestion.

With web access worsening, Vernon applied for a caching solution through E-rate funding hoping to offset demand by serving content locally.

Thanks to CACHEBOX, the district is offloading over 90% of the terabytes of traffic demanded monthly – including state testing content (DRC Testing).

Liberated from Microsoft, Windows, Apple and HTTPS Chrome updates the district has now eliminated congestion and improved the classroom user experience.

Strafford SD tackles congestion from software updates

Strafford SD caters for 1,240 students across 3 schools on a single campus. E-learning is critical to the district’s curriculum where a mix of Chromebooks, Windows PCs, Mac and iPad devices are used to deliver online classroom content.

However, with 500 Windows PCs downloading gigabytes of updates simultaneously, network congestion quickly became a serious issue. As a result, Tech Coordinator Richard Cline received several complaints a day from teachers and students experiencing connectivity problems.

Strafford SD R6, MO

1 School | 1,240 Students
Suburban | 375Mbps

With plans to fully roll out a 1:1 scheme in the following year, Richard knew congestion would only worsen as more devices and software traffic joined the network.

But he also understood that a bandwidth upgrade would only be a temporary fix. And, as soon as there was more capacity, network demand would eventually increase inline - leading to congestion once again. So, he consulted neighboring districts in MO who recommended caching. With CACHEBOX E-Rate’s #1 caching solution for schools, he decided to deploy a CACHEBOX230.

By storing popular online content requested by Strafford’s network and serving it via the LAN, CACHEBOX now routinely delivers an average of 50-60% bandwidth savings on gigabytes of traffic.

Since deployment, the greatest savings month to month are from caching Windows and MS software updates – with CACHEBOX routinely taking up to 90% of software traffic off Strafford SD’s bandwidth link.

Tech Director David Holst is delighted with the impact CACHEBOX has on the network, and e-Learning overall: “Since deploying the CACHEBOX we haven’t heard a single complain coming from teachers or students. That’s enough for us to know that the device is doing exactly what we purchased it for,” comments.

Safeguarding online tests – and much more with caching

Sand Ridge and Sweet Home in rural Oregon are both People Involved in Education (PIE) charter schools which follow identical curriculum and best practice. However, during state testing periods, everything grinds to a halt at both schools.

Spikes in traffic were overwhelming connectivity, causing congestion - access would slow dramatically, risking student outcomes at each school. Software updates for the schools’ devices were only adding to the problem, often throughout the school day.

PIE Charter Schools, OR

2 Schools | 366/200 Students
Rural | 100Mbps/50Mbps

Seeking a way to ensure fair, consistent access, the tech manager for both schools applied for E-rate funding for caching, hoping to source a suitable solution. One such proposal got him very excited.

Learning that CACHEBOX not only caches its Pearson-based Smarter Balanced test content but also content-rich material from Core Knowledge Curriculum, McGraw-Hill and Saxon Math, the tech manager wanted to know more. Finding that it would also cache the problematic software updates for the schools’ growing number of user devices, an order was quickly placed - one for each school.

Now, thanks to CACHEBOX, both schools are offloading the majority of demand to local cache.

In September 2019, Sand Ridge met 84% of ALL demand for content from cache, freeing up capacity for prime learning content. Software updates accounted for a huge 97% of all school downloads, but CACHEBOX served an average 88% of that – peaking at over 90% for Microsoft.

And because CACHEBOX is serving that content locally at much faster LAN speeds, students are enjoying a far more responsive user experience in the classroom – at up to 115 times faster than content served from the internet. No queues, no delays – and no more school concerns for disrupted lessons or testing periods.

Safeguarding online tests – and much more with caching

As its teaching environments rely heavily on Apple devices, apps and content, String Theory schools must ensure a responsive internet experience. Its students and teachers needed unrestricted access to content - but there was a problem.

Apple traffic regularly accounted for over 90% of all monthly downloads, but too much of that traffic simply wasn’t for learning. Software updates for its 1:1 iOS devices and accompanying apps were excessive, hogging the internet and causing a slowdown in access. And worse, these downloads were multi-gigabytes in size and notoriously slow to download – meaning they would jam the network all day long.

String Theory Schools, Philadelphia Performing Arts, PA

2 Schools | 3,800 Students
Urban | 1Gbps

Despite dedicated links at each of its 4 campuses, from 300Mbps to 1Gbps, students were too often facing lengthy page-load times as well as big delays when watching online video. With Voice Over IP (VOIP) also served over the same bandwidth capacity, complaints from students, teachers and staff were high.

Having deployed a "Mac-Mini" Apple Caching solution to serve some of that content locally, the school had expected instant results but that hadn’t materialized. It was clear the schools’ caching performance needed an almighty boost – as well as some smarter features that apple caching doesn’t deliver.

Excited by the more inclusive caching power of CACHEBOX, its wealth of features and extra security options, it ordered three units to meet campus demands.

Dedicated to maximum school performance, CACHEBOX caches far more content than any other solution – including learning content, video and HTTPS, as well as software updates from all vendors, not just apple.

This time the effect was very noticeable. Speed in the classroom is far quicker. No student waits for content anymore. Caching results have been so good, the school switched off its Apple Caching.

At its largest performing arts campus, Vine, CACHEBOX is caching up to an amazing 93.9% of all monthly demand and serving it locally – not only speeding up delivery to quicker LAN speeds but freeing up its internet connection for other content, as well as VoIP services.

And of its previously problematic apple content that we can see accounts for as much as 95.3% of campus demand (6.1TB of a total 6.4TB), String Theory is now happily caching 96.4% of it. User experience is now as good as it gets.

Bandwidth capacity boost for e-learning access

In rural Missouri, Southwest R-V had limited access to bandwidth. Its consortia-led allocation of 80Mbps was often very congested due to the amount of video being watched in the classroom.

With the High School running a 1:1 learning scheme and its primary and middle schools having 1 device for every 2 students, demand was simply too high. The tech team faced constant complaints from teachers about the internet not working properly and students facing too long a delay.

SouthWest R-V, MO

3 Schools | 875 Students
Rural | 500Mbps

Aware that neighboring schools had deployed caching through E-rate, the district’s Tech Director raised the topic in a regional IT directors meeting. CACHEBOX was the only one his peers recommended.

CACHEBOX is the only schools-focused cache that caches everything a school needs – from video to learning content to software updates for all platforms. Uniquely backed up by ongoing cache development, CACHEBOX adapts to ensure evolving web traffic gets cached, it’s always improving. Happy with caching 40-50% of traffic in 2018, by the end of 2019 the school is now delighted.

Despite a new bandwidth contract giving more capacity, the school is finding it isn’t using it. Having upscaled its CACHEBOX to match the higher throughput, it’s now caching up to 90% of all traffic. In October 2019, 99.7% of the 1.5TB of Microsoft software updates requested were served from cache.

CACHEBOX has also made a big difference in speed. Not just because so much capacity has been made available for content but also because serving it locally means serving it at LAN speeds, not internet speeds. Learning content served from cache is arriving many times faster – as high as 400 times faster.

"“CACHEBOX has really helped us avoid congestion. I get no complaints from teachers regarding slow network speeds. We couldn't get more access than the 100Mbps until 2019 due to where we are located, so we couldn't live without the appliance.”"Dan Shelton, Technology Director
TBs of software updates relieved from the network

In rural New Mexico, Dexter provides e-learning to over 1,000 students across 3 campuses. Despite having a seemingly sufficient 750Mbps connection, the district still struggles to handle spikes in simultaneous 1:1 traffic.

With e-learning at the center of its curriculum, teachers heavily rely on online resources in the classroom. But with students accessing the same materials at the same time, spikes in demand regularly saturate the network – substantially reducing the quality of lessons.

Dexter Consolidated Schools, NM

3 Schools | 1,019 Students |
Rural | 750Mbps

Worse still, the Schools’ Windows-based devices were also downloading bandwidth-heavy operating software updates, jamming the network even more.

To better handle updates and spikes in classroom traffic, Dexter chose the #1 E-Rate-funded caching appliance, CACHEBOX, to store and serve popular educational content locally.

Now the district is saving up to 80-90% of bandwidth monthly, having liberated its network from terabytes of Microsoft, Windows, Chrome and Antivirus updates.

As a result, devices at Dexter now receive the vast majority of software updates locally, at much faster LAN speeds. Bandwidth has been reclaimed, releasing further network capacity for additional e-learning resources. As a result, teachers and students are now enjoying a premium, more engaging user experience.

Multiply existing capacity, no matter how much you have

Orchard Farm struggled with congestion from excessive spikes in classroom demand, but neighbouring district Webb City recommended CACHEBOX instead of a bandwidth upgrade.

That was back in 2014. Five years on and CACHEBOX has continued to offload demand and multiply effective capacity. When bandwidth prices fell, the district upgraded capacity - but CACHEBOX still outperformed it, delivering effective capacity up to 700Mbps despite a new 250Mbps link.

Orchard Farm R-V School District, MO

4 Schools | 1,865 Students |
Rural | 500Mbps

Through 2019, CACHEBOX regularly served half of all requested content from cache locally, including software updates for all devices in use – from laptops to iPads – offloading gigabytes of demand that could have congested the network.

Now in 2020, with a new school building and additional Chromebooks for students, the district is enjoying 500Mbps at the same price. But Technology Director Bill Niemeyer knows CACHEBOX has a vital role to play, so he has upgraded to a higher throughput appliance.

The new appliance is already supporting growing traffic from all 4 schools, as more users and more web-based content becomes part of the curriculum. Bill’s been so impressed with CACHEBOX he’s recommended it to neighbouring districts - so much so he doesn’t think there’s any left to talk to.

Highly specialised caching for schools

The second largest public school district in Alaska, with a huge geographic region to match, Fairbanks North Star Borough keeps learning ‘centred’ on its 14,000+ students through ‘independent learning’ programmes, each demanding fast, responsive access to the internet.

But in rolling out ‘one device: one user’ (1:1) learning, as well as supporting a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) network, traffic has rocketed.

Fairbanks North Star Borough School District, AK

33 Schools | 14,000 Students |
Rural | 2 x 2Gbps

Networking Services Director Robert Higst knew that with a mix of over 12,000 iPads, MacBooks, Chromebooks and Windows pcs, software updates were his biggest problem. Hogging bandwidth for most of the day, classrooms were left with very slow access, impacting not only learning but online testing.

Aware that caching could help, but wary of past experience with ill-fitting caches, Robert applied for E-Rate funding for caching - hoping modern solutions were more suited.

Highly specialised to meet school needs, a CACHEBOX bid got his attention. Caching ‘everything’ a school needs - not just software updates for one platform, but all – as well as learning content, video and even HTTPS – Robert immediately ordered an appliance.

Deployed in one ‘trial’ remote school, CACHEBOX has changed his perception of schools’ caching. It’s not simply easier to deploy and use, it’s already offloading as much as 91% of software updates for Chromebooks and iPads, instantly alleviating congestion.

Online testing content is also seeing big changes. 98% of Proctor Testing content is served from cache – at faster LAN speeds - not only guaranteeing access but accelerating it too, as much as 41 times faster than from the internet.

Delighted by the results, and fully converted to CACHEBOX, Richard has outlined plans for CACHEBOXes at 15 more remotely located schools with lower capacity connections.

No more network saturation from software updates

Staff and students at Pretty Eagle Catholic School were suffering from slow internet in the classroom. The small K-8 school had a 100Mbps connection which, in theory, should have been enough bandwidth to serve its 150 users.

However, in practice, content was slow to reach the classroom, which caused frustrating delays for teachers and students and made the user experience ineffective for learning.

Pretty Eagle Catholic Academy, MT

1 School | 150 Students |
Rural | 100Mbps

As a remote private school, not receiving state or federal grants, paying out for more bandwidth was not an option. So it turned to CACHEBOX to transform the user experience.

Instantly, speed improved. CACHEBOX reports show the overwhelming majority of Pretty Eagle’s bandwidth was consumed by software updates - up to 86% of traffic in any one month. The slow downloads had clogged the internet connection, creating peaks that overwhelmed the existing capacity.

With CACHEBOX, bandwidth-hungry downloads can be served at LAN speeds, including software updates. In March 2020, over half of Microsoft content and three-quarters of Windows updates were served from cache, at respective speeds of 20 times and 35 times faster than from the internet alone.

Now, content that matters to students and teachers is no longer forced to queue. As software updates to student devices arrive more quickly, traffic clears the network sooner, eliminating saturation and extending the life of Pretty Eagle’s existing bandwidth.

Start-of-lesson peaks eliminated

St Joseph Parish School wanted to use more online video content to improve the quality of its classroom teaching. But its small 75 Mbps connection was not enough to support the 600 devices on its network, and congestion was causing delays all day long.

When multiple classes requested the same online materials at the start of lessons, demand spiked and the network was quickly overloaded. Students complained about the slow speeds and the tech team were hounded with support requests. Worse yet, staff worried that the unreliable connection would affect state testing – putting learning outcomes at risk.

St Joseph Parish School, OH

2 Schools | 600 Devices |
Rural | 75Mbps

St Joseph didn’t have the budget for a bandwidth increase: a bigger connection meant additional, unavoidable costs for a new firewall and switches. The school needed to find a better way to manage capacity with its existing kit, to get a better return on their investment.

CACHEBOX was the cost-effective bandwidth boost St Joseph needed. In January 2020 alone, it saved 1.25TB of bandwidth and delivered 89% of the school’s total content from cache, slashing demand on the connection to just 11%.

With no need to upgrade - and lots of future room to expand – St Josephs can make the most of its existing investment.

Warren's students get faster classroom content

In completing his district’s E-Rate application form for bandwidth funding, Network Administrator Steve Schaefer made a spontaneous decision to include a request for caching. With the district soon upgrading capacity from 200Mbps to 500Mbps, he really didn’t expect to go ahead with it, doubtful it would bring any benefit.

However, once a proposal for CACHEBOX arrived, that idea was turned on its head pretty quickly. Steve was surprised to find that so much schools content was cacheable, and that faster speeds in the classroom was possible, without ever higher speed connections.

Warren County School District R3, MO

5 Schools | 3,219 Students |
Suburban | 500Mbps

Seeing CACHEBOX data from schools across Missouri, he realised Warren County had been missing out on uncluttered access to faster content.

Having deployed CACHEBOX and upgraded its internet capacity, it is CACHEBOX that is handling the vast majority of Warren County’s traffic.

What’s more, with most content now served locally over the LAN – at much faster LAN speeds – content is arriving hundreds of times faster.

In the classroom, CACHEBOX is delivering vital learning content up to 600 times faster than from the internet – even on the districts higher speed link. Steve is so glad his curiosity overcame his lack of awareness.

Students get faster priority classroom content

At Tallassee City in rural Alabama each school offers 1:1 learning. Equipping almost 2,000 students with iPads caused a meteoric rise in online traffic, but the district hoped upgrades in additional capacity would ensure congestion-free internet.

However, despite increasing from 100Mbps all the way up to 1Gbps, feedback from the classroom wasn’t positive. Teachers complained that students regularly struggled to access content quickly enough. Learning content especially, remained slow to arrive – impacting lesson plans.

Tallassee City SD, AL

3 Schools | 1,849 Students |
Rural | 1.5Gbps

Thankfully, with CACHEBOX ability to handle all manner of school content, including learning content, video and software updates – the district finally found the acceleration it was looking for.

Having deployed CACHEBOX and upgraded its internet capacity, it is CACHEBOX that is handling the vast majority of Tallassee’s traffic.

Content from particularly slow servers upstream simply can’t be fetched faster – even with unlimited capacity. But by storing and serving content locally from CACHEBOX, that same content is being delivered 30, 50, even 77 times faster!

MacBooks today, ChromeBooks tomorrow – CACHEBOX delivers

Having rolled out its first 1:1 learning scheme, Muscatine’s traffic was overwhelming internet capacity – leaving its new devices with a slow and frustrating user experience.

Despite having an old BlueCoat caching device gathering dust, Muscatine’s Technology Supervisor Scott Cornstock knew that the right cache would help alleviate growing traffic congestion.

Muscatine Community SD, IA

10 Schools | 5,036 Students |
Suburban | 1Gbps

Finding CACHEBOX capable of caching far more content than expected – including learning content, video and software updates for the growing number of MacBooks in use – Scott realised modern schools caching had changed, significantly.

Deploying a distributed solution of 3 CACHEBOX appliances back in 2012, Muscatine was able to deliver the premium user experience needed across all 10 schools, despite having just 40Mbps.

Fast-forward to 2018 and the district’s High Schools have swung away from a former Apple-based learning scheme. Hundreds of 1:1 devices have been replaced with ChromeBooks, and an expanded curriculum that includes online state testing.

Muscatine has upgraded to 1Gbps, but CACHEBOX continues to deliver the majority of content from cache – keeping the internet free from congestion. In November 2019, 67% of all content was served from cache. Up to 99.3% of prime learning and testing content no longer needs to come from the internet. And the biggest consumer of bandwidth - software updates that would have overwhelmed the network - are well under CACHEBOX’s control.

Bandwidth capacity liberated for an optimal e-learning experience

Hamilton Unified School District in rural California caters for 700 students across 3 schools. Ambitious e-learning goals have seen students equipped with Windows and Chromebook devices. But with its 1Gbps bandwidth capacity under pressure from hundreds of students connected at the same time, congestion soon became a problem, causing slow web access in class.

Hamilton Unified SD, CA

3 Schools | 697 Students |
Rural | 1Gbps

During a school day, duplicate requests rapidly saturate the network. Bandwidth-hungry e-learning websites, like YouTube, accessed concurrently, cause network congestion and slow speeds, particularly at peak times, putting the quality of lessons at risk.

With plans to further expand 1:1 and deploy BYOD district-wide for up to 1,200 devices in the next two years, Technology Director Frank James knew congestion would only worsen.

Frank turned to CACHEBOX – the only schools-dedicated cache to store and serve popular school content locally at faster LAN speeds.

Thanks to CACHEBOX, the district is now offloading an average of 68% of internet demand locally, including duplicate requests for huge software updates for the many district devices.

Eliminate excessive spikes in traffic, free up capacity

As Merrimack Valley moved its high school to a 1:1 device per student model, it found new traffic peaks were leaving students queuing to access online content.

Having embraced online learning approaches, teachers were now using online video during lessons. But as whole classes viewed the same video on individual iPads, the spike in simultaneous demand would quickly overwhelm the district’s internet connection, causing a severe slowdown.

Merrimack Valley School District, NH

7 Schools | 2,500+ Students |
Town Locale | 1Gbps

Despite the recent bandwidth upgrade from 600Mbps to 1Gbps, Technology Director Lee Despres was disappointed to be receiving complaints from teachers. With plans to add Chromebooks in other schools on the horizon, he needed another way to smooth out excessive traffic spikes and guarantee access to learning.

After he and his tech team were introduced to CACHEBOX and its schools-dedicated caching features, he was sold. By caching in-demand content and serving it locally, repeat demand for duplicate content can be met without students needing further access to the internet. Now, the district is ready to add additional user devices without it impacting learning for everyone else.

With CACHEBOX effectively boosting existing capacity locally, those huge spikes of internet traffic have been quashed. With up to 74% of all traffic being served locally, huge swathes of capacity have been freed up. Congestion has vanished, as too complaints from the classroom.

Faster web access by maximizing existing capacity

As a boarding school, SEED has to handle traffic from a wide variety of learning devices for longer than the typical school day. However, software updates for the many platforms were clogging the internet, impacting video, and slowing down online tests to a crawl.

With repeat demand for duplicate content hindering learning throughout the school day, SEED deployed CACHEBOX to meet that demand locally. By downloading a single copy of the content requested and serving it from cache, more demand is met without further access to the internet.

The SEED Public Charter School of Washington, D.C.

1 School | 370 Students |
Suburban | 100Mbps

~50% of Apple updates and ~70% of Chromebook updates are no longer downloaded from the internet. CACHEBOX is helping free up an average ~45% of bandwidth each month.

In removing the bottleneck and alleviating pressure on the network, teachers are free to use the online resources they need. Video doesn’t buffer, students enjoy fast access to content and vitally, online testing has become a dependable, consistent experience.

Rolling out 1:1 district-wide, affordably

Having completed a 1:1 pilot scheme in the fall of 2017, Moses Lake planned to roll out similar schemes district wide, reaching over 8,500 students across 15 sites. However, the district’s high and middle schools were already maxing out their internet links. The increased demand for online content was saturating connectivity causing congestion.

Buffering video and slow page load times were impacting 1:1’s success in the classroom. But upgrading bandwidth capacity at these and the other 13 schools scheduled for roll-out over the summer simply wouldn’t be financially viable.

Moses Lake School District, WA

22 Schools | 8,500 Students |
Town Locale | 10Gbps

Needing to avoid upgrading all its 100Mbps and 1Gbps links, the tech team turned to caching. Having some knowledge of a squid caching server in the past, they hoped a new, dedicated solution could deliver e-learning capacity more affordably.

CACHEBOX ticked all the right boxes. Deploying appliances at its digital core as well as a number at its more remote schools meant 1:1 was smoothly - without congestion – and at a lower cost.

By storing and serving both learning content and software updates for the now countless devices in use daily, demand for the internet is slashed. Even with huge increases in traffic, CACHEBOX is meeting the majority of demand from cache. By September 2019, some appliances were serving an average of 86% of all demanded content.

With so much capacity reclaimed for other things, or additional users, content is free to arrive unhindered.

But thanks to CACHEBOX serving it locally – at far faster LAN speeds – content is also being accelerated. Learning content which would otherwise trickle down the internet at mere Kbps is now arriving up to 215 times faster.

Safe access to state testing on small connections

With 267 pre K – 8 students using a combination of iPads and PCs, St Ambrose needed fast and reliable access to the internet.

When multiple students were accessing content at the same time, the existing bandwidth became congested. Slow access disrupted lessons and impacted learning. Sometimes, students were waiting so long for content they got timed out, which also raised concerns over online testing. The school needed to guarantee fair, consistent access to essential content.

St Ambrose Catholic School, AZ

1 School | 267 Students |
Urban | 30Mbps

Rather than upgrade its 30Mbps connection, St Ambrose deployed a CACHEBOX to maximize existing bandwidth use. CACHEBOX stored and served content locally to minimize the requests. It consistently cached over 60% of monthly content, which instantly eliminated congestion and freed up capacity for more content.

St Ambrose saw the biggest changes in commonly used educational content: In September 2020, 99% of Pearson testing content was served from cache. What’s more, that content arrived many times faster than from the internet.

By serving content locally at much faster LAN speeds, CACHEBOX dramatically increased the speed of educational content delivery on the network.

The school can now guarantee its students congestion-free, speedy access to content, so teachers can keep learning on track.

How caching saves bandwidth

Some school districts are fortunate enough to have access to affordable bandwidth. For others, even with E-rate funding, high capacity links are too expensive. And in some - typically rural - cases, high capacity links are simply not available.

By storing copies of web content the first time it is accessed and serving repeat requests locally, schools can make relatively small links go a long way.

A school district with lots of student devices - particularly one with a 1:1 scheme - will find that more than 50% of their bandwidth is consumed by software updates.

OS, anti-virus and application vendors regularly provide updates to improve performance, usability and security. These files are often enormous, swamping your network when simultaneously accessed by thousands of devices.

Districts that deal with this by deploying a cache effectively reach the FCC/SETDA target of 1Mbps per student with only 500Kbps per student connections.

To avoid using most of your capacity downloading software updates your 1:1 needs the 1:1,000 approach that only caching can give you: 1 download:1000s of devices!

How caching flattens peaks

The uniqueness of K-12 web traffic, with its large 'start-of-lesson' spikes in demand (for mainly duplicate requests) has significant consequences for bandwidth management.

These infrequent peaks are often used to define how much bandwidth capacity a school needs. However, since these same peaks are highly cachable, caching can significantly reduce the amount of capacity needed.

If a school purchases bandwidth to cover these spikes in demand - without deploying caching - the amount of unused capacity is dramatic (as represented by the red shaded area, below). Being unused MOST of the time, whether broadband is affordable or not, the excess capacity represents significant wastage of both school and E-Rate funds.

Caching enables 'burstable capacity' at low cost - so schools can easily handle periodic surges in demand (typically 6-7 times higher than sustained traffic) while only paying for average throughput. It offers real value to rural schools because it delivers accessibility at a fraction of the cost of fibre.

The reality for E-learning is that capacity is not the real goal - speed of classroom browsing is. Affordability remains an important and constant goal, and caching is key to this; there is no upside to excessive bandwidth.

How does caching makes content faster

Teacher tools like Lesson Management or Adaptive Learning Systems typically use embedded video to encourage independent learning, keep students engaged and clearly communicate complex ideas. When this content feels slow, these benefits can be lost.

Upgrading bandwidth lets you support more users, but the speed at which your users can access content depends on many other factors. From the physical sending of data to the ability of the content provider's web server to meet demand, many of the causes of slow content are outside of your control.

Caching content - storing and serving it locally - eliminates these delays and puts user experience back in your hands. In schools this can be the difference between keeping students engaged and losing their attention as they wait for content to load.




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About CACHEBOX

Our caching appliance has been the most widely selected caching solution by far in the E-rate program since 2015. It is the only fit-for-purpose schools-focused solution in the sector that handles 'whole school' traffic patterns including HTTPS, software updates, video and LMS password protected materials.

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