At Jefferson County School District, Chromebook updates were routinely congesting the district's bandwidth.
CACHEBOX now serves all repeat requests for updates, freeing up bandwidth for more important educational activities.
Over the course of 6 years, West Clermont has had to increase its Internet connection multiple times to accommodate growing demand.
The district turned to caching instead of opting for another costly and time-consuming bandwidth upgrade. By deploying CACHEBOX West Clermont has reduced its bandwidth usage by 50%.
Chicago Public Schools has been using caches for over a decade to accelerate access to resources in the classroom.
In 2023, the district replaced their obsolete Cisco caching system with a CACHEBOX at each of its 600 schools.
Highlands County School District was dealing with severe network congestion, as Chromebook updates were taking up to a week to download.
With CACHEBOX updates are now served 5 times faster, freeing up the network for more important educational content.
For years, Matanuska had relied on caching to ensure that staff and students could access digital resources quickly and reliably. But then its Qwilt cache server reached end of life.
Matanuska chose a central CACHEBOX deployment to support its 49 schools.
Whiteriver USD 20 would frequently find its network congested by devices downloading large software update files, causing the internet to slow down.
The district purchased a CACHEBOX to tackle its bandwidth hogs, resulting in Edu content (HTTP and HTTPS) arriving to students at much faster speeds.
Somerton School District 11 initially planned to replace outdated Apple caching servers in three schools to enhance network capacity for its 1:1 Apple Air initiative.
Instead, the district purchased a CACHEBOX as a non-vendor-specific caching solution to alleviate pressure on its network.
Finkelstein first deployed an E-Rate-funded CACHEBOX in 2016 as part of a broader network overhaul.
In July 2023, of 4.00TB total traffic, a massive 95% was served from cache. 3.5TB of this was Microsoft updates for staff and user access computers.
Despite having 4 times the FCC's recommended bandwidth per student, students and teachers still faced slowdowns during peak usage periods.
With the help of E-Rate funding, Fabens ISD purchased a CACHEBOX. Now Edu content (HTTP and HTTPS) is delivered up to 200 times faster.
Despite a 500Mbps connection, Schoology content was often arriving to students at less than 1Mbps.
CACHEBOX has accelerated content to arrive 14 times faster.
Perry County School District needed a solution to maximise its limited bandwidth..
CACHEBOX offered better value for money than a bandwidth upgrade.
Bayless School District's connection was not sufficient to fully support its students, resulting in dramatic slowdowns in the classrooms.
With CACHEBOX the district is consistently serving terabytes of traffic, at much faster speeds.
Libertyville would routinely find its network congested and its aging Apple caching server could not keep up with demand.
With CACHEBOX 76% of its content is served through caching, arriving at much faster speeds than before.
With 400 users connecting to its 30Mbps internet at peak times, Osage consistently found its bandwidth maxed out.
CACHEBOX offered a cost-effective solution to expand its BYOD scheme, rather than opting for a bandwidth upgrade.
Kake City School District is already paying thousands of dollars for its 200Mbps connection and needed a solution to optimize its bandwidth.
CACHEBOX is eliminating congestion and serving gigabytes of content to students.
With plans to expand its 1:1 scheme, Kalispell needed a way to prevent the disruption congestion was causing in its classrooms.
With CACHEBOX educational content is now arriving almost 400 times faster.
Lewis County's failing YouTube filter meant teachers had no way to control the content that students were exposed to.
With CACHEBOX video content is now distributed to students through the Media Library, keeping the students safe and allowing teachers to continue using videos in their lessons.
Martins Ferry's connection could not keep up with the demands from the district's 1:1 Chromebook scheme.
With CACHEBOX content is served faster and students can now access learning content that was previously unavailable.
Hundreds of students connected at the same time was causing slow web access at Waldron Public Schools.
CACHEBOX is removing terabytes of traffic from its internet connection.
With the demand for content rising, Schlarman's connection could not keep up - causing disruption in classrooms.
With CACHEBOX the district is using less than half of its connection, and content is served up to 200 times faster.
Community School District first purchased a CACHEBOX to optimise its bandwidth capacity.
Now, in order to further improve its internet connectivity, the district has chosen to upgrade both its CACHEBOX device as well as its bandwidth connection.
Manhattan Christian Academy would regularly find its network congested by devices downloading large software update files, causing the internet to slow down.
The school purchased a CACHEBOX to tackle its bandwidth hogs and increase its browsing speed.
With whole classes accessing the same online content at the same time, Our Lady of Mount Carmel's 100Mbps link was regularly congested.
With CACHEBOX congestion no longer a problem and learning content is now arriving up to 105 times faster.
Despite paying out $30,000 a month, classroom demand would quickly overwhelm Yakutat's 25Mbps connection.
CACHEBOX has slashed the amount of bandwidth needed.
Despite an impressive 6.4Mbps per-student capacity, Maine School Admin District 49's network would still grind to a halt.
CACHEBOX is meeting over 70% of all content demanded – but 'updates' performance is even better.
In order to sufficiently support it's 143 students, by FCC standards, Amsterdam Elementary District 75 needs more than triple its current bandwidth.
With CACHEBOX the school district can comfortably support all of its students with its current bandwidth.
With 37,000 students to support, East Baton Rouge wanted a caching solution that would cache everything – especially HTTPS content.
Now, bandwidth consumption in the district's central distribution center has been slashed by 70% – 90% every month, serving Terrabytes of data much faster than the internet.
With software updates rapidly congesting its network, Yelm Community Schools needed a solution other than a bandwidth increase.
With CACHEBOX the district is served a total of 6.03TB's worth of content – including software updates, antivirus updates and important classroom content.
With hundreds of repeat requests daily, Believers Academy deployed a CACHEBOX solution to free up bandwidth and increase web-content speeds.
With a 1:1 scheme consisting of 1000s of Apple devices, Discovery High School quickly found out how great an issue software updates are going to be for its network.
After deploying CACHEBOX, 98% of content from Apple.com is served through cache – at much faster speeds.
With thousands of devices all connecting to the internet at the same time, Mandan SD's network was sure to suffer.
To avoid internet congestion disrupting precious learning time, the school district opted to deploy a CACHEBOX, thus optimizing its existing bandwidth.
With several hundred operating system updates all downloading at the same time, Central Valley's classroom learning was put at risk.
Since deployment, CACHEBOX is picking up the strain caused by software updates while also serving learning content through the cache at much higher speeds.
Bagdad Unified School District's 300Mbps connection was routinely congested with huge software files, and the school district needed a solution to cope with all of the demand.
CACHEBOX provided the ideal solution to the school's problems and now it frees up to an average of 70-80% of software update content monthly.
Childress Independent School District originally deployed CACHEBOX to deliver state testing.
Since then, teachers discovered CACHEBOX's Media Library feature and its ability to provide students with online video without exposing them to inappropriate content.
Dillingham City School District was paying over $80,000 for a 20Mbps, and with over 500 devices to support, the school needed a solution other than a bandwidth increase.
With CACHEBOX deployed, the school gets millions of dollars of capacity for less than $10,000.
Lytle Independent School District should be enjoying superfast internet access, but still found it slowing down frequently.
CACHEBOX gave the school the boost it needed and now content is delivered up to 300 times faster.
When Silver CSD's 2,500 student devices tried to update essential software packages at the same time, the district's bandwidth capacity simply could not cope.
By deploying CACHEBOX, the school's network was liberated from bandwidth-hungry software updates.
The SolutionExpanding 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 SolutionWarsaw R-IX SD in rural Missouri was struggling to manage peak-time internet demands coming from 1,500 devices connected to the network every day.
After deploying CACHEBOX, the district successfully saved money and resolved its congested bandwidth issues.
Kerrville Independent School District wanted to improve its usage of videos in e-learning, without purchasing a larger internet connection.
With CACHEBOX, the district is saving up to 96% of its bandwidth and can access software updates' content up to 8 times faster.
Merritt Island Christian School wanted to expand its 1:1 scheme and needed a solution to help prevent any ensuing congestion.
With CACHEBOX, the school is able to optimize its bandwidth to a point of consistently saving 1 to 3TB of data a month.
Louise ISD in Texas wanted to incorporate more video content into its e-learning scheme, but congestion was causing delays all day long.
The district deployed a CACHEBOX in April 2022 and has instantly seen an average of 71% of its bandwidth saved monthly.
With software updates causing the most stress to its network, Greenwood 51 was looking for an appliance to help relieve their bandwidth.
In 2020 it used E-Rate funding to purchase a CACHEBOX to fulfil the district's caching needs.
When Friends Central School deployed a BYOD scheme, the number of devices tripled overnight.
CACHEBOX dealt with the Windows updates that were crushing internet speeds, accelerating content by up to 47 times faster and delaying a further bandwidth upgrade for another 2 years.
300 devices on a 500Mbps connection means that Rutland Independent School District should be getting a congestion free internet experience. But large Windows updates were starting to eat up all of their bandwidth.
By deploying CACHEBOX, Rutland can now easily manage their bandwidth and deliver content at much faster speeds.
Chapel Hill avoided having to do a massive bandwidth upgrade by deploying a CACHEBOX in order to maximize their existing connection, despite increasing their 1:1 scheme by 600%.
Despite a bandwidth upgrade, Troy Unified School District's students still experienced regular congestion. Large simultaneous demand for classroom content slowed the network down significantly.
With a cache picking up the strain, content is now delivered much faster than before.
When its already costly 5Gbps connection was still not enough to support 17,000 students, Lakota Local School District searched for a solution to avoid upgrading its bandwidth capacity.
After deploying CACHEBOX, the district's network congestion had been eliminated, with classroom content being delivered at much faster speeds.
Irvington Community Schools were able to support their classroom internet usage despite having less than the recommended 1Mbps per student.
By deploying CACHEBOX, they could easily avoid congestion and receive content at faster speeds.
540 student district Mansfield Township had less than the 1Mbps per student bandwidth target for quality e-learning in classrooms.
To boost internet performance and support growing use of online content in class, it deployed a cache for reliably fast access to e-learning content.
Lindbergh Schools District was faced with the challenge of how to effectively cater to a growing number of 1:1 devices on its network.
After deploying CACHEBOX, the district saw a significant increase in user browsing experience.
With the network at full capacity, just one viral YouTube video would bring the 15,000 student campus to a crawl.
Over the past 6 years, CACHEBOX has delivered fast speeds, slashed congestion and delayed the need for expensive bandwidth and firewall upgrades.
Yosemite could not afford to upgrade the overstretched bandwidth for all their rural schools - even with E-Rate funding.
For just 1% of Yosemite's annual internet cost, CACHEBOX immediately reduced bandwidth needs by 30-50% each month. The district can now plan a single, non-urgent upgrade and make a substantial financial saving.
When your internet connection costs $62 million a year, adding more bandwidth isn't the answer.
Thanks to CACHEBOX, students at Lower Kuskokwim School District's ultra-remote schools get the latest K-12 YouTube learning experience, and IT staff can support the schools remotely.
Despite lower bandwidth costs, Pearsall Independent School district couldn't increase their connection without a painfully expensive firewall upgrade.
But with CACHEBOX delivering 14Gbps of content on a 2Gbps connection, Pearsall got lightning-fast performance AND reduced the amount of traffic that the equipment needed to handle - delaying the need to upgrade.
Nome City SD is a 1:1 Google district – but in remote Alaska, their expensive 75Mbps fiber connection was far from sufficient for adaptive learning platforms.
By deploying CACHEBOX, Nome City freed up bandwidth for Google Classroom, streaming and online collaboration platforms – and problems with insufficient bandwidth have vanished.
Chris Rule Director of Information Services at Sublette County has long recognized the benefit of caching, so much so he used to custom-build his own.
But hands-on DIY experience had meant wasted labor and stress getting it to perform with school content. With a dedicated CACHEBOX, his time is his own and schools' performance is guaranteed.
Greenwood School District 52 wanted to deploy Chromebooks in a 1:1 scheme, so it more than doubled its bandwidth. However, the district still experienced congestion.
With caching, Greenwood was able to offload 75%+ of Chromebook updates during the 1:1 rollout, without the need for more bandwidth.
Newcastle's tech team chose the #1 federally-funded caching appliance in order to offload more classroom content than alternatives. Serving an average of 88% of demand locally, CACHEBOX is keeping connectivity fast and free every month.
Fremont RE-2 school district in Colorado replaced an ineffective Apple Cache and offloaded so much 1:1 traffic, students gained a premium digital learning experience in the classroom without additional bandwidth.
Plato R-V in rural Missouri won the network battle with large game downloads for esports.
With caching offloading up to 72% of gaming updates, the district benefits from a premium user experience.
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 was able to launch e-learning more affordably, without paying higher monthly fees.
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.
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.
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 50, 60, even 77 times faster!
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.
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 was slashed to 11%.
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.
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.
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.
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 800+ students.
With classroom lessons at risk, Dexter turned to caching to better offload demand and free up access to e-learning content.
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.
As full 'apple' teaching environments, String Theory schools expected to be leading the way in digital 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 solutionWith 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.
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 handled the majority of traffic demand – up to 90% monthly.
A consortia-led allocation of 80Mbps for Southwest meant limited access to media-rich digital 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.
With huge system updates from Apple, Microsoft and Windows regularly congesting the network, Washington Township's large investment in 1:1 was at risk of abandonment.
Now, CACHEBOX serves as much as 74% of total network traffic directly from cache, taking the load off the network and accelerating requests directly from the district's LAN.
St Ambrose needed fast and reliable access to the internet and online testing, on just 400Mbps 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.
Running comprehensive Cyber School programs for Grades 2 through 12, including Odysseyware for personalized instruction, Spring Cove was all set to exploit digital 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 up to 300 times faster!
The SolutionTied 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 SolutionWith plans to distribute more student devices, Brookfield knew its 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 maximise bandwidth and accelerate their internet speed.
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 solutionTo 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 solutionDurant'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 solutionWith 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 solutionWith 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 solutionAs 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 SolutionWith 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 SolutionEven 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 solutionNewcomerstown 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 SolutionEven 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.
Glenbard pays over $9000 per month for 15Gbps bandwidth, but over half of all traffic is
Software updates for 1:1 devices.
CACHEBOX has reclaimed that capacity for education
content.
St Paul Public School District had 5 times FCC's 2016 target 100Kbps per student student to ensure fast, reliable web access. CACHEBOX boosted the districts investment in high capacity by eliminating congestion.
The SolutionOak 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 SolutionIn 2016, Westwood CSD invested $36k pa to more than double the FCC's per student internet capacity target and deliver a premium online classroom experience.
But, after upgrading, it was disappointed to find lots of content still arriving slowly - paying out for extra bandwidth wasn't good value. After deploying CACHEBOX, students finally had fast access to web content and the district was able to delay bandwidth upgrades until they were cost-effective.
The SolutionNueces 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 SolutionIn 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 SolutionProviding sufficient Internet capacity for their 1:1 e-learning was high priority for Black River Falls.
Deploying CACHEBOX quickly freed up 75% of their bandwidth, enabling unrestricted web access, faster content and space for more users.
The SolutionSouthwest 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 benefited from the equivalent of 275Mbps at less than half the price per Mbps.
The SolutionHaving 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 SolutionBrandon 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.
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 SolutionHaving 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 SolutionWith 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 SolutionDespite 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 SolutionThanks 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 SolutionFredericktown'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 SolutionDespite 3 bandwidth upgrades, El Dorado Springs suffered huge congestion from huge software update files.
CACHEBOX served as much as 96% of the district's most bandwidth-heavy content.
The SolutionBrowning Schools in rural Montana spends $3750 per month for a 550 Mbps connection - shared among 2200 students across 10 sites.
CACHEBOX consistently kept the district's traffic below 500Mbps, avoiding the need for an expensive bandwidth upgrade.
The SolutionIn 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 SolutionSimultaneous 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 SolutionForcing 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 86% by serving popular content locally.
The SolutionIn 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 SolutionLike 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 – up to 36 times faster!
The SolutionWith 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 offloaded this content, freeing up capacity for content that matters.
The SolutionTrinity'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 SolutionTechnology Center of Du Page in Addison, Illinois, is a technical school with a 500Mbps connection and approximately 1,000 network users. CACHEBOX is providing over 2X their original capacity at ½ the price per Mbps.
The SolutionAfter 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 SolutionWith 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 SolutionImplementing 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 SolutionKeokuk'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 78% of requested content is served from local cache - and is up to 100x faster.
The SolutionWith 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 SolutionWith 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 SolutionTo 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 SolutionFranklin didn't want to spend more on bandwidth – it's expensive in their rural locale. However, software updates for devices had spiraled, consuming precious capacity.
Thankfully CACHEBOX cached these huge bandwidth-heavy files – enabling Franklin to offload up to 99% of content – freeing up capacity for what's important.
The SolutionIn 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 SolutionAs 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 SolutionTeachers 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 was meeting multiple demands simultaneously from just a single download – and doing it much faster.
The SolutionAt Des Moines, Apple, iOS, Windows, Chromebook, Android and even BYOD devices constantly accessed the network. When they independently needed to update software, the resulting congestion could clog the network. CACHEBOX is the only schools-focused cache that can handle all this content in one easy-to-use appliance.
The SolutionFowler 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 SolutionAward-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 had future-proofed its current investment and capacity with caching - freeing up to 87% for more content or more users.
The SolutionWith 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 SolutionWith 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 had rocketed.
The SolutionHighlands County School District was dealing with severe network congestion, with Chromebook updates taking up to a week to download—causing headaches for the IT team and disrupting classrooms. Technology Manager Harry Howes, with 25 years at the district, knew that upgrading links across all 18 schools wouldn't make a difference, and would be costly, complex, and time-consuming.
Highlands County School District, FL
18 Schools | 12,36 Students
Local | 6Gbps
Instead, Harry turned to caching. He deployed a CACHEBOX at each of the schools, instantly easing the strain on the network links by serving terabytes of content through cache. Now, instead of taking 7 days to download, software updates are delivered up to 5 times faster, freeing up the network for more essential educational content.
Domain | Served from Web | Served from Cache | BHR % | Speed increase |
---|---|---|---|---|
chromebookupdates.com | 9.74TB | 7.11TB | 73% | 5 times faster |
microsoft.com | 6.19TB | 2.43TB | 39% | 2 times faster |
google.com | 330GB | 163GB | 49% | 18 times faster |
windowsupdate.com | 192GB | 114GB | 60% | 4 times faster |
Overall | 18.0TB | 10.3TB | 57% |
Students are also benefiting from faster content in the classroom, with HTTPS traffic being served up to 84 times faster through CACHEBOX.
Domain | Scheme | Speed from Web | Speed from Cache | Speed increase |
---|---|---|---|---|
quizlet.com | https | 133Kbps | 11.2Mbps | 84 times faster |
powerschool.com | https | 83.2Kbps | 6.63Mbps | 80 times faster |
ixl.com | https | 106Kbps | 6.98Mbps | 66 times faster |
edulastic.com | https | 154Kbps | 5.23Mbps | 34 times faster |
commonlit.org | https | 184Kbps | 5.89Mbps | 32 times faster |
quizizz.com | https | 245Kbps | 7.33Mbps | 30 times faster |
amplify.com | https | 430Kbps | 8.81Mbps | 21 times faster |
pbskids.org | https | 432Kbps | 8.19Mbps | 19 times faster |
studyisland.com | https | 478Kbps | 9.03Mbps | 19 times faster |
Harry also installed a CACHEBOX Central Management Console (CMC) to allow his technical team to manage each appliance without needing to travel to the schools. Updates, changes, configurations and backups can all be performed in bulk without any local site admin.
Somerton School District 11 initially set out to replace outdated Apple caching servers at three of its seven schools, aiming to improve its network's capacity to support its 1:1 Apple Air initiative.
However, it soon became clear that bandwidth alone wasn't the issue. Despite having the necessary capacity, the district's existing network hardware — particularly the firewall — couldn't handle high throughput during peak times. As a result, up to 50% of their bandwidth was routinely blocked, causing severe congestion and impacting classroom activities.
8 Schools | 3,645 Students
Local | 5Gbps
Network Administrator Luis Tenorio's first instinct was to upgrade the firewall, hoping it would alleviate the bottleneck. However, Luis realized that without additional measures, the network would still face issues as traffic demands continued to grow. Reflecting on the positive impact Apple caching had previously provided, he recognized that a broader, non-vendor-specific caching solution could offer a more sustainable fix.
By expanding caching beyond Apple traffic, CACHEBOX significantly reduced bandwidth demand across the network, resolving congestion and delivering classroom content much faster than increasing capacity alone could achieve. Storing content closer to users bypassed internet bottlenecks, allowing the firewall to operate without becoming a limiting factor during peak times.
This dual approach allowed the district to maximize the efficiency of both the firewall and CACHEBOX, avoiding further immediate costly upgrades and freeing up resources for other critical educational needs.
Detailed reports reveal the significant performance improvements, with the district's cache serving terabytes of content and delivering educational sites up to 50 times faster than the internet alone.
Domain | Scheme | Traffic from web | Traffic from cache | Speed from Web | Speed from Cache | Speed increase |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
hmhco.com | https | 159GB | 80.7GB | 20.8Mbps | 645Mbps | 31 times |
rhdiscovery.com | https | 1.13GB | 976MB | 2.92Mbps | 152Mbps | 52 times |
powerschool.com | https | 67.8GB | 1.53GB | 4.0Mbps | 92.3Mbps | 23 times |
pbskids.org | https | 5.39GB | 3.71GB | 11.0Mbps | 60.7Mbps | 6 times |
ixl.com | https | 33.8GB | 8.93GB | 2.68Mbps | 28.3Mbps | 11 times |
abcya.com | https | 12.7GB | 8.3GB | 12.4Mbps | 22.8Mbps | 2 times |
code.org | https | 9.35GB | 3.12GB | 4.80Mbps | 20.2Mbps | 5 times |
Visual reports also clearly demonstrate the difference in delivery rates between the local caching server (green) and the internet connection (blue):
By radically improving network efficiency, Somerton School District 11 has minimized the frequency and cost of future upgrades, ensuring sustainable performance and long-term savings.
Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District, the second largest district in Alaska, faced a significant challenge when its Qwilt cache server reached end of life.
For years, the district had relied on caching to ensure that staff and students could access digital resources quickly and reliably. Now, without a cache server, every single content request or update would now be served directly from the Internet, rather than the local network, overwhelming the district's internet connection.
Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District, AK
49 Schools | 19,291 Students
Rural | 3Gbps
By storing frequently accessed content locally on a cache, Matanuska-Susitna has been able to support significantly higher demand at speeds much faster than the internet alone could provide, especially during peak times.
Given the remote locations of the district's 49 schools, it would have been near-impossible to upgrade the internet connection to sufficiently handle the volume of traffic. And to cope with the increased throughput, the district would also have needed to upgrade its other network kit, such as firewalls, routers, and switches, at significant cost.
Matanuska chose a central CACHEBOX deployment to support its schools. Unlike the unsupported Qwilt server, CACHEBOX offers vendor-backed support, regular updates and effortless maintenance – providing the reliable performance the district needs with minimal effort.
At Jefferson County School District, the second largest school district in Alabama, Chromebook updates were maxing out the district's bandwidth.
To alleviate the strain, the district implemented CACHEBOX.
Jefferson County School District, AL
57 Schools | 35,000 Students
Local | 12Gbps
CACHEBOX now serves all repeat requests for Chromebook updates, preventing thousands of devices from fetching the same update over the internet simultaneously. In October 2024 alone, it delivered over 13.00TB of Chromebook updates freeing up bandwidth for critical educational activities and maintaining a reliable, high-speed connection for the district's daily needs.
And by caching the updates locally, CACHEBOX is not only relieving the strain on the network but also delivering them three times faster.
Over the course of 6 years West Clermont Local School District had to increase its Internet connection 4 times to accommodate growing demand. Tech Director Larry Parece recognized that this was quickly becoming a never-ending upgrade cycle – and that more bandwidth was not the solution.
This time, instead of opting for another costly and time-consuming bandwidth upgrade – along with the additional kit needed to support it – Larry considered caching.
West Clermont Local School District, OH
9 Schools | 8,360 Students
Local | 3.3Gbps
By implementing CACHEBOX, West Clermont was able to reduce its bandwidth usage by 50%, for a fraction of the cost and time required for a full bandwidth and network kit upgrade, whist giving them far greater performance and even more effective capacity than what the upgrade would have delivered.
As a result of deploying CACHEBOX, West Clermont has:
And because content is served directly over the district's LAN, students can now access online resources – including HTTPS Educational sites – up to 15 times faster.
Domain | Scheme | Speed from Web | Speed from Cache | Speed increase |
---|---|---|---|---|
coolmathgames.com | https | 955Kbps | 14.0Mbps | 15 times |
utah.edu | http | 505Kbps | 6.01Mbps | 12 times |
abcmouse.com | https | 204Kbps | 1.98Mbps | 10 times |
abcya.com | https | 877Kbps | 4.55Mbps | 5 times |
CACHEBOX has freed up West Clermont's budget to invest in direct educational improvements, rather than the next network upgrade.
And if a bandwidth update is eventually needed, it will be much smaller.
At Fabens Independent School District, students and staff should be experiencing superfast internet access, with 4 times the FCC's recommended bandwidth per student. However, despite this, they still faced slowdowns during peak usage periods.
Closer inspection confirmed that congestion was not causing the slow speeds. Even if it had been, increasing capacity wasn't a feasible or financially sustainable option. Tech Director Michael Perez realized that a caching solution was the answer.
Fabens Independent School District, TX
4 Schools | 2,320 Students
Local | 10Gbps
With the help of E-Rate funding, Fabens purchased a CACHEBOX310, a dedicated caching server to give the district the boost it needed. Now Edu content is delivered up to 200 times faster:
Domain | Scheme | Speed from Web | Speed from Cache | Speed increase |
---|---|---|---|---|
office.com | https | 49.0Kbps | 9.78Mbps | 200 times |
jasperactive.com | http | 61.7Kbps | 9.54Mbps | 155 times |
conjuguemos.com | http | 107Kbps | 10.1Mbps | 96 times |
noredink.com | https | 60.9Kbps | 4.04Mbps | 66 times |
amplify.com | https | 178Kbps | 7.51Mbps | 42 times |
quizlet.com | https | 156Kbps | 4.77Mbps | 31 times |
mathsisfun.com | https | 446Kbps | 13.0Mbps | 29 times |
testnav.com | https | 537Kbps | 10.5Mbps | 19 times |
discoveryeducation.com | https | 359Kbps | 6.24Mbps | 17 times |
powerschool.com | https | 340Kbps | 4.63Mbps | 14 times |
Detailed reports also provide a useful graphic representation of the difference in delivery rates between the internet connection (blue) and the local caching server (green):
Whiteriver Unified School District 20 was struggling frequently with Chromebook system updates consuming its entire connection, grinding the network to a halt, and putting classroom learning at risk. With internet costs already exceeding $650,000 annually, upgrading the connection wasn't a cost-effective option.
Tech Director Pierre Dehombreux sought a less costly way to reduce the strain of software updates. His ideal solution needed to be easy to set up and maintain.
Whiteriver Unified School District 20, AZ
5 Schools | 2,272 Students
Rural | 1Gbps
Equivalent to just 1 month of Whiteriver's internet cost, CACHEBOX, a purpose-built caching device, offers Whiteriver the perfect solution to its problems. It relieves the pressure from system updates and simultaneously accelerates learning content delivery by serving it at much higher speeds—even with less than 1Mbps available per student.
Now in 2024, as Whiteriver plans to transition from Chromebooks to Windows laptops, CACHEBOX remains a key asset, efficiently caching Windows updates while still eliminating the need to increase their bandwidth.
Edu content sped up:
Domain | Scheme | Speed from Web | Speed from Cache | Speed increase |
---|---|---|---|---|
quizizz.com | https | 52.6Kbps | 10.2Mbps | 195 times |
quizlett.com | https | 233Kbps | 41.3Mbps | 177 times |
mheducation.com | https | 395Kbps | 12.9Mbps | 33 times |
imaginelearning.com | https | 1.32Mbps | 28.6Mbps | 22 times |
powerschool.com | https | 514Kbps | 4.81Mbps | 9 times |
code.org | https | 1.17Mbps | 4.80Mbps | 4 times |
crazygames.com | https | 2.24Mbps | 8.22Mbps | 4 times |
coolmathgames.com | https | 1.70Mbps | 4.13Mbps | 2 times |
mathplayground.com | https | 2.43Mbps | 4.95Mbps | 2 times |
Software update speeds:
Domain | Scheme | Speed from Web | Speed from Cache | Speed increase |
---|---|---|---|---|
office.net | https | 2.13Mbps | 24.6Mbps | 12 times |
chromebookupdates.com | http | 1.66Mbps | 14.6Mbps | 9 times |
apple.com | https | 707Kbps | 4.85Mbps | 7 times |
windowsupdate.com | http | 3.97Mbps | 11.2Mbps | 3 times |
microsoft.com | http | 3.69Mbps | 7.67Mbps | 2 times |
Finkelstein Memorial Library first deployed an E-Rate-funded CACHEBOX in 2016 as part of a broader network overhaul.
Since then, the appliance has become a core part of the library's network to maintain fast performance for users across a wide range of user access computers, loaned Chromebooks, and devices accessing the free public Wi-Fi.
Finkelstein Memorial Library, NY
130,000 People Served
In July 2023, of 4.00TB total traffic, a massive 95% was served from cache. 3.5TB of this was Microsoft updates for staff and user access computers. Without CACHEBOX, this traffic would have been downloaded from the internet, congesting the network and slowing browsing speeds for users accessing other content. But with CACHEBOX on the network, 99% of Microsoft updates were served from cache.
For Head of Department Robert Rowe, CACHEBOX is a 'set and forget' device: "CACHEBOX is doing a great job without me having to do much. I rarely look at the CACHEBOX reports, but it does capture a lot of useful information."
And because content from CACHEBOX is delivered at fast local network (LAN) speed, it reached users 9 times faster than from the internet.
"Having a CACHEBOX in place really does make the internet so much faster for our patrons. It is amazing and so affordable on E-Rate, with 85% funding why wouldn't you do it!"
Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has been using caches for over a decade to accelerate access to resources in the classroom and make their network radically more efficient. And even with upgraded networks, that's just as relevant today as it's always been.
600 Schools | 310,756 Students
Local | 160Gbps
CPS's new Skyline K12 Curriculum provides digital tools and resources for high-quality e-Learning adoption – and needs great content performance for a seamless learning experience.
In 2023, the district replaced their obsolete Cisco caching system with a CACHEBOX at each of its 600 schools, and a cluster of powerful CACHEBOX appliances at its network core.
By combining caching with other network efficiency strategies, the district saves on internet and WAN bandwidth as well as on network infrastructure equipment like filters and firewalls. Content is delivered many times faster than it arrives from the internet – much faster than can be achieved on higher-cost, higher-capacity infrastructure at other districts.
Core curriculum content accelerated 20x
Crucially for CPS, CACHEBOX optimizes digital resources made available via its Safari Montage Learning Object Repository. Its advanced caching algorithms can safely handle Safari Montage's HTTPS traffic, serving content up to 20x faster than if it were downloaded directly from the internet.
Safari Montage served from internet: 0.23 MB/s
Safari Montage served from cache: 4.46 MB/s
Content
accelerated: 20x
Detailed reports
Detailed monthly reports from early CACHEBOX deployments provide a useful graphic representation of the difference in delivery rates between the internet connection and the local caching server:
On the right in blue is traffic arriving from the internet with a hotspot around 1-3 Mbps (red circle) and a significant user-experience drag of smaller objects that are indeed very slow (green circle). Very few objects arrive faster than 30 Mbps and next to nothing above 50-60 Mbps.
In green on the left, accelerated content is reaching 300-700 Mbps with a hotspot centered on 10-60 Mbps. The tail of slow content circled in green has been pushed up to a faster average speed resulting in almost all objects being served at 1 Mbps at least.
Schoology content at Bellefontaine City Schools was slow. Despite a 500Mbps connection, content was often arriving to students at less than 1Mbps.
District Technology Coordinator Marc Stakey recognized that upgrading to a higher-cost, higher-capacity core connection wouldn't solve the problem.
Bellefontaine City Schools, OH
4 Schools | 2,354 Students
Local | 500Mbps
Caching was the solution. Now, CACHEBOX's smart caching algorithms accelerate Bellefontaine's large volumes of secure HTTPS traffic, delivering it many times faster than it arrives from the internet.
Schoology
Speed from
web: 0.245MB/s
Speed from CACHEBOX: 4.51MB/s
CACHEBOX accelerated: 14x faster
In October 2023, 90% of the district's 3.39 million requests for Schoolology HTTPS content were served from CACHEBOX.
CACHEBOX effectively tripled Bellfontaine's existing bandwidth without any change to the existing internet connection – and sped up Schoology and other learning platforms for a far better user experience.
"Overall I've been extremely impressed with the CACHEBOX and its implementation. It has
saved us a ton
of network bandwidth going back to our ITC."
Mark Stakey, District Technology Coordinator
Osage County R-2 Schools, a school district in Missouri, had first introduced a partial BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) scheme in 2017. With 400 users connecting to its 30Mbps internet at peak times, the district consistently found its bandwidth maxed out by software updates.
Osage County School District R-II, MO
2 Schools | 625 Students
Local | 100Mbps
Osage implemented caching as a cost-effective solution to expand its BYOD scheme, rather than opting for a bandwidth upgrade. CACHEBOX efficiently cleared software and security updates from the network, freeing up the connection for other learning content.
Fast forward to 2023, and the district has expanded to over 600 users. Thanks to CACHEBOX, the district has needed fewer, smaller bandwidth upgrades - maximizing its network efficiency.
"We really feel the difference on our Chromebooks updates when we use CACHEBOX. The first
update takes
a little while, but all requests after that are practically instant!"
Eric Morfeld, Technology Coordinator
Domain | Served from Web | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
gvt1.com | 81.9GB | 48.1GB | 59% |
microsoft.com | 55.2GB | 46.8GB | 85% |
securly.com | 4.59GB | 4.51GB | 98% |
windowsupdate.com | 8.50GB | 1.56GB | 18% |
Total Overall Traffic | 161GB | 102GB | 63% |
Twenty thousand dollars. That is what Kake City School District in Alaska pays for its 200Mbps internet connection per month.
Bandwidth in Alaska is notoriously expensive with schools paying big bucks for small connections. Another recurring issue is the distance between districts and their service providers. Kake City's service provider is located on another island, which adds to the latency the district experienced.
1 School | 101 Students
Rural | 200Mbps
Having already used an Apple caching server, Kake City knew that caching was the solution it needed. For a fifth of the price of its monthly bandwidth, Kake deployed a low-cost CACHEBOX to offload bandwidth-intensive content.
The district now effectively eliminates any previously seen bandwidth congestion by serving gigabytes of content through CACHEBOX, giving students faster access to more media-rich content and learning resources. CACHEBOX has also sped up crucial online state testing content, ensuring that Kake City's students are given the best possible shot at good results.
Domain | Served from Web | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 183GB | 144GB | 79% |
gvt1.com | 53.8GB | 27.7GB | 52% |
windowsupdate.com | 21.7GB | 16.3GB | 75% |
apple.com | 707MB | 224MB | 32% |
Total Overall Traffic | 305GB | 189GB | 62% |
Perry County School District in Alabama needed a solution to maximise its limited bandwidth. With 2,000 devices on a 1Gbps link the district's connection was struggling to keep up with growing internet traffic. Content was slowing down due to congestion, and the district wanted to protect access to its rich online curriculum content.
Perry County School District, AL
2 Schools | 1,972 Students
Local | 1.5Gbps
A bandwidth upgrade seems like the best way to clear internet congestion, but, the district already pays $4k for 1.5Gbps and an upgrade offered poor value for money compared to purchasing a CACHEBOX.
With CACHEBOX, Perry now serves an average 62% of content through caching, varying from educational content to software-updates and even online testing.
Domain | Served from Web | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
certiport.com | 1.05GB | 1.05GB | 99% |
datto.com | 882MB | 882MB | 99% |
hp.com | 466MB | 438MB | 94% |
microsoft.com | 216GB | 197GB | 91% |
google.com | 828GB | 735GB | 89% |
windowsupdate.com | 23.0GB | 19.8GB | 86% |
digicert.com | 1.93GB | 1.11GB | 58% |
Overall | 1.58TB | 974GB | 66% |
Bayless School District, home of the Bronchos, in Missouri first deployed a CACHEBOX in 2017. Tired of having to manually perform their Chromebook and Windows updates, Tech Director Fadil Hamidovic was in desperate need of a different solution.
CACHEBOX provided Fadil with the solution to his problems with updates, and also resolved his underlying issues with speed and costly bandwidth. At the time, Bayless's 100Mbps connection was not sufficient to fully support its students, resulting in dramatic slowdowns in the classrooms and disengaged students.
3 Schools | 1,632 Students
Local | 1Gbps
"When we brought in CACHEBOX a few years ago we had a small internet connection, which was very expensive, so we needed to save bandwidth and increase speeds. CACHEBOX allowed us to do this straight away, without upgrading our internet connection, saving us both time and money".
Because CACHEBOX serves content locally, it arrives at much faster speeds than from the internet. This made it possible for Bayless to put off any major bandwidth upgrades for a further four years.
And now, even though the district has a 1Gbps connection, CACHEBOX still continuously serves terabytes of traffic. An average 88% of software-update traffic is now served through cache.
Domain | Served from Web | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 637GB | 601GB | 94% |
amplify.com | 9.14GB | 8.32GB | 91% |
windowsupdate.com | 46.5GB | 40.5GB | 87% |
google.com | 7.21GB | 6.19GB | 86% |
gvt1.com | 783GB | 657GB | 84% |
gstatic.com | 111GB | 89.3GB | 81% |
Overall | 1.80TB | 1.54TB | 85% |
Since software-update traffic is no longer congesting the district's network for long periods of time, it frees up capacity for other learning content to be delivered at higher speeds.
Domains | Served from Web | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
prodigygame.com | 6.70GB | 6.26GB | 93% |
pbskids.org | 3.63GB | 3.03GB | 84% |
abcya.com | 6.45GB | 4.92GB | 76% |
quizlet.com | 6.40GB | 4.28GB | 67% |
Libertyville Elementary School District 70 is a 1:1 device district, implementing an array of iPads and Chromebooks for students to use.
However, the district would routinely find its network congested and, even during quieter school hours, teachers would still complain about learning content like videos being slow to load.
Libertyville Elementary School District 70, IL
5 Schools | 2,231 Students
Local | 3Gbps
To provide a quick solution to these problems, the district deployed an Apple caching server but caching Apple content alone was only a temporary fix to its network issues …
In 2018, Libertyville applied for E-Rate funding to replace the aging Apple Mac server but, instead, they found CACHEBOX – the only caching solution that caches everything a school needs.
In deploying CACHEBOX, the district soon found the root cause of its congestion – software updates. Now, an overall 76% of content is served through caching, with a further 81% of software updates served from CACHEBOX. And because cached content is served locally, it arrives at much faster speeds.
In 2018, the district also launched its ACCESS student device programme. The goal of this programme is to provide students with the technology to support their success at school, home and with future careers. And for the past five years, CACHEBOX has been giving the district the added boost to provide students with the best learning experience possible.
Domains | Served from Web | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
securly.com | 7.51GB | 7.40GB | 99% |
gvt1.com | 146GB | 132GB | 90% |
google.com | 330GB | 267GB | 81% |
microosft.com | 24.2GB | 19.1GB | 79% |
windowsupdate.com | 3.45GB | 2.67GB | 77% |
Overall | 583GB | 443GB | 76% |
With plans to expand its 1:1 device scheme across its 11 schools, Kalispell School District 5 soon found its network regularly congested. With thousands of users accessing bandwidth-heavy content at the same time, the network would become saturated bringing things to a grinding halt.
Kalispell Public School District 5, MT
11 Schools | 6,209 Students
Local | 5Gbps
The resulting slowdown was causing significant disruption in the classroom and teachers were becoming frustrated.
Luckily, with E-Rate funding, the district was able to purchase a CACHEBOX – and now it serves an average of 75% of traffic through its cache. Congestion is now no longer a problem and because the majority of content is served locally, learning content is arriving up to 300 times faster.
Domains | Speed from Web | Speed from Cache | Speed increase |
---|---|---|---|
testnav.com | 204Kbps | 76.1Mbps | 374 times |
weebly.com | 262Kbps | 95.3Mbps | 364 times |
coloring-book.info | 63.1Kbps | 12.2Mbps | 193 times |
apple.com | 328Kbps | 51.1Mbps | 156 times |
creativelanguageclass.com | 1.78Mbps | 74.9Mbps | 42 times |
microsoft.com | 1.81Mbps | 21.9Mbps | 12 times |
windowsupdate.com | 2.49Mbps | 11.2Mbps | 5 times |
google.com | 459Kbps | 2.02Mbps | 4 times |
"Everything is super-fast with CACHEBOX", says Tech Director Jason Hecock, "I really like the features of the CACHEBOX and they work really well".
Lewis County C-1 School District is a 1 device per student (1:1) district in Missouri with almost 1,000 students. The district relies heavily on Google Classroom and YouTube content for teaching. However, students were easily distracted by other content on YouTube and, due to a failing YouTube filter, teachers had no way to control the content that students were exposed to.
Lewis County School District C 1, MO
2 Schools | 908 Students
Local | 1.5Gbps
Frustrated, Tech Director Susan Moore posted about the issue on a message board. Recognising the exact same problem that he had overcome, neighbouring Tech Director Dan Shelton at Southwest Barry SD recommended CACHEBOX.
CACHEBOX Media Library allows teachers to choose their own lesson content which it then automatically downloads overnight, ready for sharing with individual students, whole classes or school wide.
Teachers can now add videos from YouTube to the Media Library, where students will be able to access it buffer free and without any distractions from other surrounding content on YouTube. And what's more, using the Media Library also protects students from harmful video content – the district can now be confident that they're compliant with the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA).
But content from the Media Library is not the only content that is now accessed buffer free – the district is seeing a multitude of other benefits from CACHEBOX as well.
Domains | Served from Web | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
securly.com | 4.65GB | 4.58GB | 99% |
apple.com | 45.0GB | 33.4GB | 74% |
microsoft.com | 43.1GB | 31.4GB | 73% |
google.com | 2.21GB | 1.01GB | 46% |
windowsupdate.com | 2.11GB | 839MB | 40% |
Domain | Served from Web | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
prodigygame.com | 2.05GB | 1.92GB | 94% |
splashmath.com | 5.95GB | 5.45GB | 92% |
pbskids.com | 2.54GB | 1.65GB | 65% |
abcya.org | 2.00GB | 1.15GB | 58% |
xtramath.org | 267MB | 156MB | 58% |
Domain | Served from Web | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
quizizz.com | 853MB | 655MB | 77% |
quizlet.com | 581MB | 338MB | 58% |
learnosity.com | 1.46GB | 668MB | 46% |
"CACHEBOX has enabled our educators to control how they share educational content through YouTube videos! Prior to the CACHEBOX, we were always battling a failing YouTube filter that was allowing too much junk through", says Susan, "we no longer have that issue and we are saving on bandwidth usage as well. The CACHEBOX has been a winning solution to both issues in our district".
Martins Ferry City School District's online curricula mainly consists of Google Classroom content and, as such, it has fully adopted a 1:1 Chromebook scheme. But, with a 500Mbps connection and 1,500 students often in need of simultaneous internet access, the district's broadband connection could not handle peak-time demand.
Martins Ferry City School District, OH
3 Schools | 1,491 Students
Local | 500Mbps
Lessons became disrupted which led to disengaged students for long periods. Content, especially from Google, was slow to arrive, putting student learning outcomes at risk.
With Martins Ferry already paying $3k per month, Technology Coordinator Bruce Hotlosz knew a bandwidth upgrade was too expensive. So, at a Tech Directors gathering, he was delighted to learn of a more cost-effective solution from Shawn Dakin of Newcomerstown. When the pair discussed connectivity issues, Shawn immediately recommended CACHEBOX.
With CACHEBOX, Martins Ferry has been able to offload up to 59% of overall student content demand, effectively avoiding the need to upgrade. And with CACHEBOX serving content from a local cache, the district no longer worries about slow content.
Domains | Served from Web | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 802GB | 762GB | 95% | 3 times |
windowsupdate.com | 9.54GB | 7.96GB | 83% | 4 times |
quizizz.com | 2.93GB | 2.37GB | 81% | 6 times |
pearson.com | 1.56GB | 1.04GB | 67% | 10 times |
google.com | 4.15GB | 2.42GB | 58% | 8 times |
Overall | 1.52TB | 889GB | 59% |
Now, students can also access learning content that was not available before deploying CACHEBOX.
Learning Domain | Served from Web | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
kamihq.com | 8.10GB | 7.72GB | 95% |
prodigygame.com | 2.73GB | 2.44GB | 89% |
abcya.com | 4.32GB | 3.06GB | 71% |
code.org | 10.2GB | 5.44GB | 53% |
mathplayground.com | 3.72GB | 1.98GB | 53% |
Waldron Public School District 45 in Arkansas caters for 1,400 students across four schools. Its 1:1 initiative has seen students equipped with Windows, Chromebook and Apple devices. But, with its 450Mbps bandwidth capacity under pressure from hundreds of students connected at the same time, congestion soon became a problem, causing slow web access in class.
Waldron Public School District 45, AR
4 Schools | 1,410 Students
Local | 2.5Gbps
During a school day, duplicate requests would routinely saturate the network. With bandwidth-hungry online learning websites like YouTube accessed frequently, the resulting slowdown was putting the quality of lessons at risk, particularly at peak times.
And to make things worse, the district's devices were simultaneously downloading bandwidth-heavy operating software updates, congesting the network even more.
Michael Galinato, the district's Tech Coordinator, turned to CACHEBOX – the only school-dedicated cache that handles 'whole school' traffic patterns including HTTPS, software updates, video and LMS password protected materials.
With CACHEBOX deployed, the pressure on the district's network is lifted. Overall, 79% of traffic is served directly from CACHEBOX, removing 1.3TB of traffic from their internet connection.
Domains | Served from Web | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
activsoftware.co.uk | 1.12GB | 1.12GB | 99% |
windowsupdate.com | 170GB | 163GB | 96% |
microsoft.com | 659GB | 621GB | 94% |
gvt1.com | 164GB | 105GB | 64% |
google.com | 480GB | 293GB | 61% |
Overall | 1.69TB | 1.34TB | 79% |
"CACHEBOX has paid for itself with the amount of bandwidth savings we are seeing from software updates," says Michael Galinato, "we would see speed decreases if we were to remove CACHEBOX from our networks!"
After introducing a 1:1 program with 350 Chromebook computers, Schlarman Academy would often find its 200Mbps internet connection congested. The resulting slowdown was causing disruption in the classroom.
2 Schools | 385 Students
Local | 200Mbps
With the demand for content rising, especially during start-of-lesson peaks, the district's limited bandwidth capacity was not enough – putting student learning at risk.
Technology Director, David Calkins, knew that caching was the right solution to reduce the load on their current internet connection and applied for E-Rate funding to purchase an appliance.
With CACHEBOX, the district now uses less than half of its connection capacity and 61% of content is being served through CACHEBOX. Because content is served locally, students are receiving educational content much, much faster – up to 200 times faster, in fact!
Domains | Speed from Web | Speed from Cache | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|---|
chemistryexplained.com | 233Kbps | 45.7Mbps | 196 times |
bookrags.com | 191Kbps | 23.2Mbps | 122 times |
scrapcoloring.com | 178Kbps | 10.3Mbps | 58 times |
abcmouse.com | 240Kbps | 5.48Mbps | 23 times |
schmoop.com | 209Kbps | 4.06Mbps | 19 times |
Overall | 434GB | 329GB | 76% |
"The CACHEBOX is doing a good job. I checked our internet traffic around our worst peak-usage
time and we never maxed out our full 200Mbps connection like we used to. With CACHEBOX, the
traffic on our internet connection stayed at around 40-50 Mbps."
David Calkins, Tech Director
Community R-VI School District in Missouri first purchased a CACHEBOX in 2017. Back then the district had first implemented a 1:1 program for its 350 students and needed a solution to optimise its small bandwidth of only 50Mbps.
Community R-VI School District, MO
2 Schools | 315 Students
Local | 500Mbps
Now in 2023, after growth in use of internet in class, the district is ready to increase its bandwidth to up to 1Gbps, giving the district over 3Mbps per student – more than enough to properly support students by FCC standards.
But Karen Davis, Tech Director at Community School District, is no fool. She understands that better internet capacity is not a guarantee that the connection will remain congestion free. Increasing bandwidth will make the network faster overall but it won't give schools the capacity to handle all students logging in at the same time, routine online testing or operating-software updates – only caching can do this.
That is why the district is choosing to upgrade its CACHEBOX210 to CACHEBOX230 alongside its bandwidth upgrade. By doing this the district is ensuring that students will continue to receive the benefits of cached content – and teachers will have access to helpful CACHEBOX features like the Media Library, which is used to share instructional videos.
Community School District is seeing the biggest changes in commonly used educational content: in September 2022, 91% of Microsoft content was served from cache. With congestion from software updates eliminated students spend less time waiting for content to load and are more engaged - classroom experience is taken to the next level.
Domains | Served from Web | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 236GB | 215GB | 91% |
google.com | 75.4GB | 47.7GB | 63% |
gvt1.com | 40.1GB | 31.2GB | 78% |
windowsupdate.com | 14.8GB | 9.88GB | 67% |
apple.com | 18.7GB | 8.33GB | 45% |
Overall | 434GB | 329GB | 76% |
"When it comes to a big bandwidth and caching, a lot of districts think it's an either-or situation," explains Caching Consultant Alastair Scobbie, "but, in actuality, caching and bandwidth go hand in hand and only the smartest districts understand that. Caching can take a big bandwidth and give a district massive savings!"
Manhattan Christian Academy in New York benefits from a large 1Gbps internet connection to support its less than 300 students and with a state-of-the-art computer lab set up, student learning should be at an all-time high.
Manhattan Christian Academy, NY
2 Schools | 245 Students
Local | 1Gbps
However, the school would regularly find its network congested by devices downloading large software update files, making the internet too slow for effective use and bringing student learning to a standstill.
In 2020 the school purchased a CACHEBOX to tackle its bandwidth hogs and increase its browsing speed. Because CACHEBOX caches repeat content, it is the perfect solution to solve Manhattan's connection issues.
With repeat requests being served locally, the connection is cleared for more important content. And since CACHEBOX not only caches software updates, but everything a school needs, core learning content is served faster as well!
Domains | Total Traffic | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 65.7GB | 57.2GB | 87% |
bitdefender.net | 7.91GB | 6.14GB | 78% |
windowsupdate.com | 12.3GB | 9.27GB | 76% |
gvt1.com | 3.38GB | 2.11GB | 63% |
google.com | 34.6GB | 17.7GB | 51% |
Overall | 135GB | 93.9GB | 70% |
With whole classes accessing the same online content at the same time, Our Lady of Mount Carmel's 100Mbps link was regularly congested. Requests quickly backed up, leaving students and teachers with such a slow user experience that student engagement was put at risk.
1 School | 170 Students
Local | 100Mbps
Having worked with caches in the past, Tech Director Christopher Lane knew what they could do for schools. CACHEBOX's ease of use had caught his attention and gave him the solution the school needed.
Originally planning to purchase a CACHEBOX with the help of E-Rate funding, the school found CACHEBOX to be affordable enough to purchase without having to wait for the current E-Rate cycle to end – the school's students benefitted from fast web access immediately.
With congestion no longer a problem, core learning content in the classroom is now arriving up to 105 times faster. And because there is no more waiting or delays, students can now have the learning experience they deserve.
Domain | Speed from Web | Speed from Cache | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|---|
worldlywise3000.com | 14.7Kbps | 1.55Mbps | 105 times |
wordleunlimited.com | 320Kbps | 14.5Mbps | 45 times |
bp.blogspot.com | 155Kbps | 5.61Mbps | 36 times |
dashnet.org | 46.3Kbps | 800Kbps | 17 times |
gvt1.com | 1.77Mbps | 5.96Mbps | 3 times |
Yakutat, like a lot of remote Alaskan school districts, pays eye-watering sums for below-average internet capacity. Despite paying out $30,000 a month, classroom demand would quickly overwhelm its 25Mbps connection, making online testing, learning and independent research almost impossible for its students.
2 Schools | 96 Students
Local | 25Mbps
Urgently looking for a way to free up its congested network and make the most of its current broadband connection, Yakutat turned to CACHEBOX. By caching repeat content and serving subsequent requests locally, CACHEBOX has slashed the amount of bandwidth needed.
This has freed up existing capacity – directly improving the students' in-class learning experience. Teachers can now confidently include YouTube videos and data-heavy learning resources without fear of congesting the network.
In choosing CACHEBOX, Yakutat has paid only a fraction of the cost of a bandwidth upgrade, enabling it to spend its precious budget on more important things!
Domains | Total Traffic | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
gvt1.com | 22.5GB | 17.1GB | 76% |
microsoft.com | 6.20GB | 1.89GB | 31% |
Overall | 45.6GB | 20.1GB | 44% |
Despite an impressive 6.4Mbps per-student capacity, Maine School Admin District 49's (MSAD) network would still 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.
Maine School Admin District, ME
6 Schools | 2,264 Students
Local | 14Gbps
Fourteen Gbps for 2,264 students had seemed sufficient but as the number of connected devices grew, so did demand for even more duplicate content. And not just for video and learning content – each new device was demanding its own software updates. This resulted in the same large multi-gigabyte files to be downloaded repeatedly.
With its plans for a fully BYOD scheme at risk, MSAD needed to find a solution to support its growing number of users.
CACHEBOX is meeting over 70% of all content demanded - but 'updates' performance is even better. The district is now able to cache updates from all Operating Systems in use – Apple, Microsoft, Google and even antivirus updates. Because cached content is served directly over the LAN, it arrives with zero latency and because the network is cleared quickly, students receive a premium, congestion-free digital-learning experience.
Domains | Total Traffic | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 549GB | 517GB | 94% |
windowsupdate.com | 61.4GB | 52.3GB | 85% |
symantecliveupdate.com | 7.15GB | 5.83GB | 81% |
adobe.com | 5.57GB | 4.51GB | 81% |
google.com | 544GB | 429GB | 79% |
cdn-apple.com | 2.37GB | 1.81GB | 77% |
gvt1.com | 219GB | 103GB | 47% |
apple.com | 69.3GB | 13.0GB | 19% |
Overall | 1.57TB | 1.14TB | 73% |
In order to sufficiently support it's 143 students, by FCC standards, Amsterdam Elementary District 75 needs more than triple its current bandwidth. With a vision to provide students with a quality learning experience, Amsterdam needed a solution that would accelerate its current bandwidth, without an actual bandwidth increase.
1 School | 143 Students
Local | 20Mbps
Amsterdam Elementary first deployed a CACHEBOX solution in 2016, allowing the district to put off an expensive bandwidth increases for the past 6 years.
With CACHEBOX in place, the school district has comfortably supported all of its students with its current bandwidth – at a fraction of the cost that surrounding schools pay. And to keep the benefits going, Amsterdam applied for E-Rate funding in 2021 to refresh its CACHEBOX hardware.
Like most school districts, a high proportion of Amsterdam's bandwidth is consumed by update files requested by student devices. The majority of these are being served by CACHEBOX.
Domains | Served from web | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 24.2GB | 17.7GB | 73% |
windowsupdate.com | 3.56GB | 2.24GB | 63% |
google.com | 20.1GB | 11.5GB | 57% |
gvt1.com | 8.20GB | 3.97GB | 48% |
Overall | 59.3GB | 35.5GB | 60% |
With updates handled locally, the connection is cleared for other educational content to be served locally as well:
As the fourth largest school district in Thurston County, Washington, Yelm Community School District handles traffic for up to 7,500 users daily, all accessing the internet using a variety of devices – from Apple Macbooks and iPads to Chromebooks and laptops.
10 Schools | 5,874 Students
Local | 2Gbps
District Network Administrator Jacob Vaughn observed that whenever users tried to update operating software, the traffic generated by the sheer number of devices in use was rapidly congesting the network – and despite paying for 2Gbps, the district's bandwidth maxed out at only 1.8Gbps.
Not wanting to put precious learning at risk and knowing an increase in bandwidth wouldn't solve its problems, the district sought a different solution.
With CACHEBOX, the only solution that caches everything a school needs, the district is able to cache updates from all software in use – Windows, Apple and ChromeOS – as well as antivirus updates, important classroom content and bandwidth-intensive video.
CACHEBOX has served a total of 6.03TB's worth of content which, if downloaded on only the district's internet connection, would have taken over 6 hours to download!
Domains | Served from web | Served from Cache | % served from cache |
---|---|---|---|
pandasecurity.com | 1.18TB | 1.17TB | 99% |
windowsupdate.com | 242GB | 230GB | 95% |
microsoft.com | 1.22TB | 1.11TB | 91% |
google.com | 3.92TB | 3.15TB | 81% |
gvt1.com | 339GB | 242GB | 71% |
cdn-apple.com | 1.90GB | 1.19GB | 63% |
Overall | 7.16TB | 6.03TB | 84% |
Believers Academy is a charter school in Florida, dedicated to providing free education to students aged fourteen to twenty one. The school provides a safe place for them to learn valuable reading and math skills as well as building on their vocabular abilities.
1 School | 125 Students
Local | 1.25Gbps
With hundreds of repeat requests daily, Believers Academy deployed a web caching solution to free up bandwidth and increase web-content speeds.
Now, 50% of content overall is served through CACHEBOX and an average 66% of all educational content.
Domains | Total Traffic | Served from Cache | % Served from cache |
---|---|---|---|
gvt1.com | 212GB | 105GB | 73% |
readingplus.com | 134GB | 98.3GB | 80% |
ixl.com | 2.66GB | 2.12GB | 58% |
windowsupdate.com | 1.95GB | 1.12GB | 53% |
Overall | 212GB | 105GB | 50% |
And because that content is served directly over the school's LAN – without needing to access the internet – students have gained much faster access to e-Learning content. Content is accessed up to 163 times faster than from the internet!
Domains | Scheme | Speed from web | Speed from Cache | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|---|---|
dreambox.com | https | 109Kbps | 17.8Mbps | 163x |
humaneresources.ai | http | 80.7Kbps | 9.27Mbps | 115x |
newsela.com | https | 187Kbps | 10.3Mbps | 55x |
scholastic.com | https | 230Kbps | 11.3Mbps | 49x |
ixl.com | https | 256Kbps | 9.41Mbps | 37x |
With a 1:1 scheme consisting of 1,000s of Apple devices, Discovery High School quickly found out how great an issue software updates are going to be for its network. With student learning at risk, Discovery needed a way to clear out its updates faster.
Having initially looked at getting an Apple caching server, Discovery chose CACHEBOX after seeing exactly how much it could benefit from caching everything rather than just Apple traffic. Not only does CACHEBOX serve 98% of content from Apple.com, but between 50 and 60% of content from educational sites like biology4kids.com is served locally by cache.
1 School | 950 Students
Local | 5Gbps
After deploying CACHEBOX, the school opted to upgrade its bandwidth as well, but it is still CACHEBOX that is handling the vast majority of Discovery High School'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. And with updates coming in at more than double the speed it usually would, the school is able to clear the network quickly, leaving more room for the content that matters.
Domains | % served from cache | Speed from web | Speed from cache | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|---|---|
biology4kids.com | 51% | 122Kbps | 15.3Mbps | 126x |
windowsupdate.com | 85% | 3.28Mbps | 81.9Mbps | 25x |
amazontrust.com | 85% | 1.31Mbps | 22.8Mbps | 17x |
polkedpathways.com | 33% | 728Kbps | 7.38Mbps | 10x |
microsoft.com | 60% | 3.98Mbps | 28.9Mbps | 8x |
apple.com | 98% | 1.36Mbps | 8.39Mbps | 6x |
Mandan School District in North Dakota has started implementing its personalized learning environment initiative, Ignite 2025. A core part of this initiative is the integration of technology into its 11 schools. The school district launched a 1 device per student (1:1) scheme in 2020, providing iPads to K-12 students for media-rich learning resources to use at home and school.
With thousands of devices all connecting to the internet at the same time, the network was sure to suffer – especially at the start of lessons or when it was time to download and install operating system software updates.
11 Schools | 4,113 Students
Local | 10Gbps
To avoid internet congestion disrupting precious learning time, the school district opted to deploy a caching server to help optimize its already existing bandwidth.
Since it deployed CACHEBOX in July 2022, the district has used 71% less bandwidth, offloading gigabytes of Google, Apple, Microsoft and Windows software updates to the cache.
Domains | Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from cache |
---|---|---|---|
adobe.com | 44.1GB | 41.5GB | 94% |
gvt1.com | 71.0GB | 61.3GB | 86% |
pearsontestcontent.com | 161MB | 138MB | 86% |
apple.com | 883GB | 677GB | 77% |
cdn-apple.com | 4.00GB | 2.64GB | 66% |
microsoft.com | 144GB | 77.0GB | 53% |
windowsupdate.com | 17.3GB | 9.22GB | 53% |
All domains (total) | 1.24TB | 875GB | 71% |
As a result of serving content locally, the average speed of internet requests has also increased by up to 90 times for popular domains – speeding up access to the online classroom and teacher content that matters the most.
Domains | Speed from web | Speed from Cache | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|---|
northdakotapreps.com | 169Kbps | 15.4Mbps | 91x |
gonzalodeamarante.com | 285Kbps | 16.2Mbps | 57x |
mandanhistory.org | 220Kbps | 6.99Mbps | 32x |
microsoft.com | 587Kbps | 17.6Mbps | 30x |
getcoloringpages.com | 642Kbps | 12.4Mbps | 19x |
pearsontestcontent.com | 216Kbps | 3.77Mbps | 18x |
windowsupdate.com | 1.23Mbps | 11.6Mbps | 10x |
apple.com | 1.93Mbps | 10.8Mbps | 6x |
Central Valley Christian Schools, a small school district in California, deployed several hundred Chromebooks for its e-learning program. However, with multiple operating system updates all downloading at the same time, the school's classroom learning was put at risk.
CACHEBOX, a purpose-built caching device, offered Central Valley the perfect solution to its problems. It picks up the strain caused by software updates while also serving learning content through the cache at much higher speeds – despite the school having less than 1 Mbps available per student.
Central Valley
Christian Schools, CA
4 Schools | 1,126 Students
Local | 1Gbps
"At the beginning of the year, we always onboard several hundred Chromebooks and the first thing they do is update their operating system. With CACHEBOX, that has happened much quicker of course," mentioned Ben Houseward, the school's IT Manager, "... that's one thing that I can notice tangibly because I'm watching all of them update at the same time.
I'm glad we have CACHEBOX. When you have 30 clients downloading the same thing, that's when CACHEBOX shines."
In just one month, 79% of 1.59TBs of content was served by CACHEBOX, 1.2TBs of which was operating system updates, highlighting just how much traffic a fleet of student devices can generate.
Domains | Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from cache |
---|---|---|---|
adobe.com | 668MB | 666MB | 99% |
yurivish.com | 115MB | 115MB | 99% |
microsoft.com | 421GB | 405GB | 96% |
google.com | 894GB | 774GB | 87% |
cdn-apple.com | 1.11GB | 931MB | 84% |
windowsupdate.com | 29.7GB | 23.3GB | 78% |
earlyamericanautomobiles.com | 465MB | 345MB | 74% |
gvt1.com | 43.0GB | 30.4GB | 71% |
All domains (total) | 1.56TB | 1.26TB | 79% |
Additionally, because content is served through the LAN at much faster LAN speeds, popular domains are served up to 35 times faster.
Domains | Speed from web | Speed from Cache | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|---|
adobe.com | 345Kbps | 12.1Mbps | 35x |
earlyamericanautomobiles.com | 607Kbps | 12.2Mbps | 20x |
llnwd.net | 1.05Mbps | 8.60Mbps | 8x |
liftoff.io | 582Kbps | 3.71Mbps | 6x |
gstatic.com | 268Kbps | 989Kbps | 4x |
microsoft.com | 1.26Mbps | 4.14Mbps | 3x |
With an open network policy and hosting over 750 devices for students and staff, Bagdad's 300Mbps connection was routinely congested by huge software files from Windows, Microsoft and Apple, causing web browsing to be slow and unreliable.
With plans to introduce more interactive media content and further invest in digital learning platforms, Network Administrator, Gary Cummins, was concerned the district's link would not be able to cope with additional demand.
Bagdad Unified
School District, AZ
3 Schools | 419 Students
Local | 300Mbps
Gary applied for cache funding through the E-Rate program and secured the ideal solution – a CACHEBOX230. Once deployed, CACHEBOX's impact was immediate. Every month, an average of 70-80% of Microsoft and Windows software updates are served directly from cache – freeing up enough capacity to meet additional classroom demand. And by serving updates locally, CACHEBOX delivers them many times faster.
Domains | Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from cache |
---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 310GB | 254GB | 82% |
gvt1.com | 20.8GB | 16.8GB | 81% |
abcya.com | 11.4GB | 8.93GB | 79% |
windowsupdate.com | 19.9GB | 13.4GB | 68% |
llnwd.net | 846GB | 281GB | 33% |
All domains (total) | 1.96TB | 663GB | 84% |
"CACHEBOX has really helped us with Windows updates, the difference is very noticeable from the way the network used to be affected before."Gary Cummins, Network Administrator
Childress Independent School District in Texas originally deployed CACHEBOX to deliver state testing, ensuring that tests load quickly, regardless of any other activity on the district internet connection. Since then, teachers discovered CACHEBOX's Media Library feature and its ability to provide students with online video without exposing them to inappropriate comments and links.
By providing controlled access to online video content, the district is able to block direct access to video platforms, allowing teachers to use powerful content in class without any buffering and with confidence that they're compliant with the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA).
Childress Independent
School District, TX
3 Schools | 1,090 Students
Local | 1Gbps
The IT director at Childress, Ignacio Rodriguez, had the following to say about the Media Library, "Media Library is a cool feature that strips down YouTube. It works well for teachers and they love it!"
Content from the Media Library is not the only content that is accessed buffer free – 89% of the school's overall content is served through the CACHEBOX, including 98% of Apple content – avoiding nearly 1TB of downloads.
Domains | Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from cache |
---|---|---|---|
sophosupd.com | 2.69GB | 2.65GB | 99% |
apple.com | 954GB | 932GB | 98% |
gvt1.com | 45.9GB | 43.3GB | 94% |
adobe.com | 8.07GB | 7.36GB | 91% |
microsoft.com | 256GB | 226GB | 88% |
windowsupdate.com | 33.2GB | 25.3GB | 76% |
google.com | 132GB | 82.3GB | 63% |
All domains (total) | 1.48TB | 1.32TB | 89% |
Paying over $80,000 per month for a 20Mbps internet connection sounds ridiculous elsewhere in the US but it's the reality for many Alaskan districts, including Dillingham. Even worse than the huge bill, 20Mbps is insufficient to support over the district's 500+ devices.
A bandwidth upgrade was out of the question: an extra 30Mbps would cost them over $200k per month. This is not cost-effective and there is no guarantee that it would even prevent further congestion.
Dillingham City
School District, AK
2 Schools | 419 Students
Local | 50Mbps
Dillingham first deployed a CACHEBOX solution in 2017, solving its immediate congestion issues and cost-effectively boosting capacity. With CACHEBOX serving the majority of internet requests, the school was getting the equivalent of more than 50Mbps at a fraction of the cost of an upgrade.
"We pay $87k per month for our 20Mbps Internet connection. Upgrading to 50Mbps would have cost us $212k per month. CACHEBOX gives us more than 50Mbps at our busiest peak times but comes with the one-off cost of $8k. Good caching system for school districts. Easy to use."
Now in 2022, the school has upgraded to 50Mbps of bandwidth. But even with the added bandwidth, CACHEBOX is still picking up any strain and 81% of the overall content is served locally. And CACHEBOX is delivering up to 190Mbps of content to students whilst the school's internet connection only provides 50Mbps.
Top Domains | Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from cache |
---|---|---|---|
gvt1.com | 82.9GB | 79.4GB | 96% |
microsoft.com | 101GB | 94.7GB | 94% |
securly.com | 1.06GB | 900MB | 85% |
windowsupdate.com | 7.8GB | 6.04GB | 77% |
google.com | 79.8GB | 39.6GB | 50% |
All domains (total) | 274GB | 221GB | 81% |
At Lytle Independent School District the students and staff should be enjoying superfast internet access in class with 5 times what the FCC's recommends, yet they still found it slowing down during peak times.
Closer inspection confirmed that congestion was not causing the slowdown and, even if it were, a higher capacity connection was not a feasible or financially sustainable solution. Having worked with caches before at Pearsall ISD, Richard Tollett knew exactly what solution he wanted.
With the help of E-Rate funding, Lytle purchased a CACHEBOX310, a dedicated caching solution to give the school the boost it needed and now content is delivered up to 300 times faster.
Lytle Independent
School District, TX
5 Schools | 1,778 Students
Local | 10Gbps
Domain | Speed from web | Speed from cache | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|---|
pearsontestcontent.com | 55.7Kbps | 17.2Mbps | 310x |
clipart-library.com | 318Kbps | 39.5Mbps | 124x |
apple.com | 690Kbps | 43.7Mbps | 63x |
revize.com | 1.84Mbps | 63.7Mbps | 35x |
testnav.com | 3.87Mbps | 100Mbps | 26x |
But not only is the school seeing major speed improvements, 95% of its overall bandwidth is also saved through caching.
Domain | Traffic Volume | Served from cache | % served from cache |
---|---|---|---|
apple.com | 250GB | 237GB | 95% |
windowsupdate.com | 78.9GB | 73.5GB | 93% |
adobe.com | 1.07GB | 955MB | 90% |
microsoft.com | 752GB | 670GB | 84% |
All domains (total) | 1.13TB | 1.01TB | 90% |
Warsaw R-IX school district in rural Missouri was struggling to manage peak-time internet demands with a 600Mbps connection and 1,500 devices connecting to the network every day.
The district was reluctant to invest in expensive bandwidth upgrades as the congestion only affected the network for short periods, usually at the start of lessons when students all attempted to access online resources at the same time. Additionally, the internet slowed down even more when over a thousand devices tried to simultaneously download new Google and Chromebook updates.
Warsaw R-IX
School District, MO
5 Schools | 1,283 Students
Rural | 600Mbps
These high-usage spikes were saturating the connection and preventing students from accessing online content, as well as disrupting lesson plans. However, resolving this issue by upgrading the broadband capacity would be particularly expensive and, what's worse, would be left redundant outside of the short peak-time periods.
Having identified the district's connectivity problems, ApplianSys deployed a CACHEBOX to relieve the school's congested internet. This appliance downloads files from the internet once and then serves all subsequent identical downloads from the network at LAN speed.
Thanks to deploying CACHEBOX, 50-85% of the district's software upgrades and peak-bandwidth usage is served from their cache, which has successfully resolved the Warsaw school district's network headaches.
Domain | Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from cache |
---|---|---|---|
google.com | 502GB | 388GB | 77% |
microsoft.com | 216GB | 176GB | 82% |
windowsupdate.com | 69.8GB | 35.2GB | 50% |
All domains (total) | 795GB | 601GB | 76% |
Kerrville Independent School District teachers wanted to use more online video content in the classroom. But its 500Mbps connection was not enough to support the 5,000 students on its network, and congestion was causing delays all day long.
Kerrville didn't have the budget for a bigger connection and the school needed to find a better way to manage capacity with its existing connection.
Kerrville Independent
School District, TX
9 Schools | 4,878 Students
Town | 5.2Gbps
With CACHEBOX in place to help it make the most of its bandwidth, Kerrville was able to put off any major upgrades for a further 4 years.
Now, the majority of software update files are being served by CACHEBOX rather than the internet connection, including impressive 3.47TB Microsoft traffic.
But Microsoft traffic is not the only major bandwidth savings that Kerrville has been seeing. Some other highlights are:
Domain | Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from cache |
---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 3.47TB | 3.50TB | 99% |
office.net | 116GB | 107GB | 92% |
google.com | 42.7GB | 24.0GB | 56% |
gvt1.com | 30.1GB | 21.8GB | 73% |
mathplayground.com | 20.3GB | 14.5GB | 71% |
All domains (overall) | 3.86TB | 3.69TB | 96% |
Kerrville is also seeing the effects of HTTPS caching, with educational websites served up to 26 times faster in the classroom.
Domain | Scheme | Speed from web | Speed from Cache | Speed increase |
---|---|---|---|---|
xtramath.org | https | 69.0Kbps | 1.80Mbps | 26 times faster |
studyisland.com | https | 512Kbps | 12.9Mbps | 25 times faster |
imaginelearning.com | https | 610Kbps | 7.78Mbps | 13 times faster |
learnosity.com | https | 1.00Mbps | 8.19Mbps | 8 times faster |
multiplication.com | https | 507Kbps | 3.40Mbps | 7 times faster |
quizizz.com | https | 313Kbps | 2.08Mbps | 7 times faster |
abcmouse.com | https | 343Kbps | 2.10Mbps | 6 times faster |
thinkthroughmath.com | https | 730Kbps | 4.41Mbps | 6 times faster |
"State Testing went smoothly and was uneventful – everything was fine. Our Microsoft Windows updates work incredibly fast, seamless and it's automatic!" says Network Administrator Chris Sullivan.
With plans to expand its 1:1 scheme, Merritt Island Christian School expected its internet traffic to grow. It needed to reduce congestion from Operating System software updates for its current fleet of student devices and control the growth in traffic from its new devices.
The school district deployed a CACHEBOX230 in 2016 to help optimize its bandwidth. Video content from sites like YouTube already consumed a large proportion of its internet capacity and after COVID, the amount of requests greatly increased. But with CACHEBOX in place, Merritt Island was able to handle the increase without the internet connection slowing down.
Merritt Island Christian School, FL
1 School | 380 Students
Urban | 1Gbps
In 2021, when Merritt Island upgraded to a 1Gbps connection, the network team wanted to continue its successful bandwidth management strategy and upgraded to CACHEBOX310.
The school is now seeing consistent bandwidth savings of 1 to 3TB of data per month from HTTP caching alone, providing the extra capacity it needs to avoid congestion.
Domain | Scheme | Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from cache |
---|---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | http | 893GB | 852GB | 95% |
windowsupdate.com | http | 80.8GB | 74.1GB | 92% |
adobe.com | http | 6.36GB | 4.75GB | 75% |
gvt1.com | https | 20.4GB | 15.0GB | 73% |
apple.com | https | 51.3GB | 29.4GB | 57% |
All domains (total) | 1.16TB | 980GB | 85% |
"CACHEBOX is the type of appliance that does its job quietly without any need to manage it to the point that the teachers and staff think the internet is simply fast, but actually I know that if we pulled it out, our internet would slow right down!"
Louise Independent School District in Texas wanted to incorporate more video content into its e-learning scheme. And with more than the FCC's recommended 1Mbps available per student, there should not have been any issues – but the school's network was not able to keep up with the amount of repeat content requests. Congestion was causing delays all day long.
With the connection already struggling to keep up with regular classroom demand, teachers feared the worst for when it was time for online testing. The slow speeds were putting students' test performance at risk and the school district needed a solution that will not only support the classroom content, but proctor caching during exam season as well.
Louise Independent School District, TX
3 Schools | 473 Students
Rural | 500Mbps
During 2021's E-Rate season, Louise Independent School found CACHEBOX, a dedicated caching device that offered a solution to its problems.
Louise ISD deployed CACHEBOX in April 2022 and has seen instantaneous results, with an average of 71% of its bandwidth saved since deployment and over 780GB of data served directly from the CACHEBOX.
Domain | Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from cache |
---|---|---|---|
digicert.com | 4.13GB | 3.57GB | 87% |
windowsupdate.com | 18.9GB | 15.8GB | 84% |
microsoft.com | 139GB | 114GB | 82% |
google.com | 173GB | 136GB | 78% |
nvidia.com | 15.4MB | 11.7MB | 76% |
Overall | 369GB | 272GB | 74% |
Greenwood 51 – a local school district in South Carolina – needed caching to reduce the volume of large files that need to be downloaded from its internet connection and to accelerate classroom content.
As software updates were causing the most stress to its network, the district was looking for an appliance that could handle updates from multiple different operating systems as well as various different educational content providers. The right solution would also cache YouTube and support proctor caching for important standardized testing periods.
Greenwood School District 51, SC
3 Schools | 884 Students
Local | 1Gbps
Neighbouring district, Greenwood 52 had long used CACHEBOX. So when 2020's E-Rate season came around, Greenwood 51 knew exactly what it wanted and purchased a CACHEBOX310 with E-Rate funding, confident that it would meet the district's needs.
Now, the majority of software update files are being served by CACHEBOX rather than the internet connection and are cleared from their network up to 9 times faster:
Domain | Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from cache |
---|---|---|---|
activsoftware.com | 364MB | 364MB | 99% |
cdn-apple.com | 57.1MB | 52.6MB | 92% |
microsoft.com | 260GB | 237GB | 91% |
windowsupdate.com | 9.40GB | 6.70GB | 71% |
apple.com | 31.4GB | 10.6GB | 34% |
CACHEBOX is also serving online test and YouTube content:
Domain | Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from cache |
---|---|---|---|
drcedirect.com | 470MB | 470MB | 99% |
adobe.com | 477MB | 466MB | 98% |
gvt1.com | 14.2GB | 12.3GB | 87% |
digicert.com | 271MB | 234MB | 87% |
As its network is no longer being saturated by software updates, Greenwood 51 is experiencing faster content in class, and can be confident of rock-solid access to test content.
When Friends Central School deployed a BYOD scheme for 800 devices in 2017, the number of devices tripled overnight. The school had planned a bandwidth upgrade to 200Mbps to pick up the increase in classroom traffic, but even a massive update would not be enough to prevent congestion caused by all the extra software updates.
Friends Central school first implemented an Apple caching device, but wanted a permanent solution that would cache all of its traffic and be compatible with multiple software vendors.
2 Schools | 769 Students
Local | 1Gbps
After seeing how CACHEBOX was performing at neighbouring district, Friends Select School, they opted to add a CACHEBOX to their network – and give students the best internet experience despite having only 0.25Mbps available per device.
Domain | Served from cache | Speed from web | Speed from cache | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 95% | 3.45Mbps | 19.7Mbps | 6x |
digicert.com | 88% | 635Kbps | 21.7Mbps | 34x |
sangkeewynnewood.com | 87% | 243Kbps | 5.07Mbps | 21x |
google.com | 63% | 445Kbps | 2.12Mbps | 5x |
eset.com | 53% | 140Kbps | 6.63Mbps | 47x |
ubuntu.com | 37% | 757Kbps | 19.7Mbps | 26x |
"We invested in CACHEBOX to deal with our Windows updates as they were crushing us in terms of our internet speeds and CACHEBOX helped us deal with this," says Dan Crowley, Technology Director.
With only 300 devices on a 500Mbps bandwidth things should have been smooth sailing at Rutland Independent School District. But large Windows updates were already starting to eat up the network capacity, putting plans to expand their amount of 1:1 internet devices on the rocks.
Rutland needed to manage their bandwidth-hungry content to maintain a fast classroom experience. But a state-limited connection meant that more bandwidth was not an option – and even if it were, it would only provide temporary relief until the connection was yet again choked up from the ever-growing number of large files.
Rutland Independent School District 39-4, SD
4 Schools | 175 Students
Rural | 500Mbps
In 2016 Rutland used E-Rate funding to purchase a CACHEBOX to clear congestion and deliver content at much faster speeds by using their existing bandwidth efficiently. And, when the State increased their bandwidth allocation, CACHEBOX continued to boost performance and delay the need for constant upgrades as internet traffic increases.
Dale Moeller, Tech Director, explains how Rutland's use of CACHEBOX has changed over time:
"When we first bought CACHEBOX bandwidth savings was our priority. CACHEBOX makes a big difference when it comes to reducing peak demand and allowing us to get more out of our bandwidth capacity. However, over the last years, the State has increased the size of our bandwidth connection, so now we see the most benefits from the speed increases and clearing large software updates from our internet pipe quickly."
Now in 2022 Rutland Independent School District is still happily caching along and are seeing major speed benefits from local caching. Overall, 95% of their requested content is served by CACHEBOX – now served up to 180 times faster.
Top Traffic Domains | Traffic Volume | Served from cache | % served from cache | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|---|---|
adobe.com | 407MB | 406MB | 99% | 180x |
vermontjournal.com | 45.3MB | 34.0MB | 75% | 5x |
linuxmint.com | 1.13GB | 907MB | 80% | 4x |
ubuntu.com | 2.59GB | 2.01GB | 78% | 4x |
gvt1.com | 11.0GB | 9.72GB | 89% | 4x |
apple.com | 8.64TB | 8.22TB | 95% | 3x |
Chapel Hill's tech director was advised by a neighboring school that buying CACHEBOX was the best investment he could make to maximize bandwidth and prevent network congestion.
This advice was soon proved true when the impact of the pandemic led to a drastic change – the district increased its number of Chromebooks for 1:1 learning from just 100 to over 600, a 600% increase.
Chapel Hill Independent School District, TX
3 Schools | 1,046 Students
Rural | 1Gbps
The simultaneous demand from so many new devices in the classroom would have required a huge bandwidth upgrade. But having already installed a CACHEBOX, that was not needed – CACHEBOX handled the huge increase in device demand for software upgrades, serving the majority of requested data from local storage. Chapel Hill was instead able to make a modest bandwidth increase, from 200Mbps to just 500Mpbs – 250%.
As students returned to school with new devices in hand, CACHEBOX was there to help meet the surge in demand. Be for Windows updates, Google or Apple, CACHEBOX served up to 96% of demand locally.
Top Traffic Domains | Traffic Volume | Served from cache | % served from cache |
---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 346.3GB | 333.9GB | 96% |
apple.com | 61.2GB | 16.4GB | 27% |
windowsupdate.com | 29.3GB | 25.9GB | 88% |
gvt1.com | 8.0GB | 3.0GB | 38% |
google.com | 3.2GB | 1.0GB | 31% |
All school traffic (total) | 548.2GB | 381.9GB | 70% |
Continually saving 70% and higher, CACHEBOX allowed the district to keep bandwidth low and better plan for more efficient, controlled and sustainable bandwidth upgrades, avoiding any need to upgrade network kit until it's needed.
Chapel Hill has now upgraded network switches and bandwidth to 1Gbps, and simultaneously upgraded to the larger CACHEBOX210, providing more caching capacity to match the school's higher traffic throughput and additional planned devices.
In rural Kansas, a 1Gbps bandwidth capacity can easily cost thousands of dollars – and at prices that high, schools would want to get the best benefits they can from it. Troy Unified School District 429 thought that, with 1Gbps bandwidth upgrade that offers 3 times the FCC's bandwidth goal of 1Mbps per student, it would be getting the best internet experience possible.
However, the district still found its network congested, and upon closer inspection, network engineers discovered that Microsoft updates were accounting for over 60% of the district's internet traffic. Derek Gilbert, who had previously deployed a CACHEBOX at neighboring Riverside Unified School District, suggested they use caching to resolve their bandwidth issues.
Troy Unified School District 429, KS
2 Schools | 336 Students
Local | 1Gbps
Now, CACHEBOX is serving over 90% of Troy's Microsoft updates, up to 4 times faster from cache than the internet. The district can make use of other educational websites as well, which would have caused the network to slow down in the past, because caching is there to pick up the strain. Crucial classroom content is now served 5x, 20x, and even 45x faster.
Domain | Total BHR | Speed from web | Speed from cache | Speed increase |
---|---|---|---|---|
roku.com | 100% | 144Kbps | 3.00Mbps | 21x |
caringforclassrooms.org | 97% | 87.2Kbps | 3.95Mbps | 45x |
microsoft.com | 92% | 1.40Mbps | 5.45Mbps | 4x |
google.com | 71% | 327Kbps | 1.98Mbps | 6x |
xboxlive.com | 47% | 740Kbps | 4.11Mbps | 6x |
"Even though we have a fast internet connection (1Gbps for 400 devices), there are a lot of benefits to bringing the content closer to users and serving content locally – this really improves the user experience!", Jared Pickerel, Technology Teacher, Troy Unified School District 429.
With over 17,000 students in need of faster internet speeds, and the cost of its 5Gbps connection already climbing to over $4,000, an upgrade was not a cost-effective option for Lakota Local School District.
Having already deployed ApplianSys' DNSBOX solution, Lakota investigated whether CACHEBOX could help it to avoid slow internet access caused by congestion.
Deploying CACHEBOX was all it took to transform the e-learning experience in the classroom, with content delivered to student devices up to 60 times faster.
Lakota Local School District, OH
20 Schools | 17,638 Students
Local | 5Gbps
31% of content from Google was served from cache and, as it was the cause of congestion, this freed up most of Lakota's bandwidth and ensured fast content from online learning sites like Coolmathgames and KamiHQ.
Domain | Served from web | Served from cache | % served served from cache | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|---|---|
instructure.com | 99.8GB | 97.8GB | 98% | 66x |
quizlet.com | 37.2GB | 19.7GB | 53% | 32x |
google.com | 523GB | 164GB | 31% | 31x |
office.com | 17.7GB | 5.44GB | 31% | 20x |
kamihq.com | 191GB | 178GB | 94% | 6x |
coolmathgames.com | 117GB | 92.5GB | 79% | 5x |
"Everything has been great with CACHEBOX – it's helping offload bandwidth to free up capacity for dynamic content," says Peter Mitchell, the Network Infrastructure Manager, "It's very much set and forget – we've had no issues and have found the general support from ApplianSys to be great!"
In order to support classroom internet usage, the FCC recommended that school districts had at least 1Mbps per student by 2018. BUT, several years later, in 2022, Irvington Community School District was able to support its 1,037 students despite having just 500Mbps – equivalent to less than 0.5Mbps per student.
By deploying CACHEBOX and configuring HTTPS caching, they were able to avoid congestion on their internet link and improve the speed that students received content from the internet by up to 60%.
Irvington Community Schools, IN
3 Schools | 1,037 Students
Local | 500Mbps
The download speeds table shows just how much of a difference caching had made for classroom content.
Domain | Speed from web | Speed from cache | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|---|
xtramath.org | 76.2 Kbps | 11.3 Mbps | 149x |
quizlet.com | 64.0 Kbps | 8.64 Mbps | 135x |
kastatic.org | 149 Kbps | 6.05 Mbps | 40x |
edulastic.com | 198 Kbps | 4.45 Mbps | 23x |
kidsa-z.com | 292 Kbps | 6.01 Mbps | 21x |
With CACHEBOX, latency was never an issue and school districts could make efficient use of smaller, less expensive connections. Content was served from within the district's network, at LAN speeds – and that could be many times faster than from the internet.
Double digit speed increases were common in schools and some of Irvington's content was served more than 100 times faster from cache.
Because they could access more content in class, at greater speeds than its internet connection could handle, Irvington had delayed the need for regular bandwidth updates – saving them money and turning their cache into cash.
Mansfield Township, a 540 student district in New Jersey, had less than the 1Mbps per student target that ensures sufficient capacity to support e-learning in classrooms. It needed to boost performance to support growing use of online content in class and opted to deploy a cache for reliably fast access to e-learning content.
As part of its e-learning scheme, Mansfield relies heavily on websites like Apex Learning and Epic Books for its testing, and uses streaming services like YouTube to provide a highly engaging learning experience. The district also implemented a 1 device per student scheme (1:1), putting further pressure on its 500Mbps internet connection. Because most of the student laptops use Microsoft's Operating System, the district's internet connection would be congested any time that devices simultaneously requested software updates.
Mansfield Township School District, NJ
2 Schools | 540 Students
Rural | 500Mbps
Mansfield Township deployed CACHEBOX at the end of July 2021. Just one month later, it was already seeing 96% of all content served from cache, including 99% of microsoft.com traffic. In addition to saving bandwidth, CACHEBOX also serves this Microsoft traffic 6 times faster than the district's internet connection is able. Therefore, software update traffic no longer congests the district's Internet links for long periods of time, freeing up capacity for other content to be delivered at high speed.
Domain | Overall Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
All content | 1.52TB | 1.45TB | 96% |
microsoft.com | 1.29TB | 1.27TB | 99% |
windowsupdate.com | 147GB | 143GB | 97% |
gvt1.com | 38.6GB | 37.2GB | 96% |
entrust.com | 155MB | 153MB | 98% |
liftoff.io | 97.9MB | 40.3MB | 41% |
digicert.com | 75.1MB | 71.7MB | 95% |
apple.com | 54.2MB | 41.3MB | 76% |
On average, the district has saved 96% of its internet capacity with CACHEBOX . Michael Miller, JDM Group (the district's technology partner) is very pleased with the results "Everything looks good - [CACHEBOX] is really helping with the Mansfield's bandwidth availability."
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.
2 Schools | 1,059 Students
Rural | 100Mbps
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 had eliminated congestion from software updates, freeing up expensive bandwidth capacity for the content that matters to students and teachers.
Large software update files were a significant cause of network congestion for school districts. The files were often requested by the entire fleet of student devices simultaneously. At these times Gigabytes or Terabytes of software updates generated large spikes in demand, leaving little capacity for critical classroom content.
On average, the district had benefited from bandwidth savings of between 87-93% each month.
Domains | Bytes Volume | Bytes Hit | BHR % |
---|---|---|---|
Overall | 1.80 TB | 1.66 TB | 92% |
microsoft.com | 997 GB | 917 GB | 92% |
windowsupdate.com | 757 GB | 727 GB | 96% |
google.com (video + other content) | 13.9 GB | 9.08 GB | 65% |
The vast majority of cached traffic comprised Microsoft and Windows updates, as well as Google video content.
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.
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 had 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 had met 80% of Apple, 89% of Adobe and 92% of Microsoft requests locally. In a single month of 15.7TB total downloads, CACHEBOX had offloaded 12TB's worth of content - which freed up huge amounts of capacity for other more important content in the classroom.
Top Applications | Traffic Volume (TB) | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|
Apple | 8.27 | 80.4% |
Adobe | 2.41 | 99.2% |
Windows | 1.02 | 91.9% |
Microsoft | 0.28 | 77.2% |
Cool Math Games | 0.25 | 20.7% |
PBS | 0.11 | % |
Mozilla | 0.06 | 98.5% |
ESPN | 0.06 | 25.7% |
Amazon AWS | 0.05 | 92.2% |
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.
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 had slashed internet traffic. With CACHEBOX, just one download could meet all subsequent requests instantly – putting an end to queuing - and freeing up masses of unused capacity for other content.
But CACHEBOX had given Fowler more... Because content was served from within the LAN, it reached the classroom at LAN speeds - often many times quicker than from the internet. Hitting faster speeds (between 9-40x faster) – the responsive user experience it demanded had been realized, without wasting more funds catering for duplicate traffic.
Domain | Speed from Web | Speed from Cache | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|---|
storylineonline.net | 158kbps | 6.4Mbps | 40x |
tumblemobile.com | 111kbps | 3.8Mbps | 35x |
starfall.com | 260kbps | 6.3Mbps | 24x |
smarttech.com | 1.5Mbps | 17.2Mbps | 12x |
scholastic.com | 215kbps | 2.0Mbps | 9x |
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 served at LAN speeds, content in the classroom arrived up to 46 times faster.
Domain | % Cached | From Web | From Cache | Speed increase |
---|---|---|---|---|
avast.com | 99.95% | 170 Kbps | 4.8 Mbps | 28x |
microsoft.com | 60.40% | 27 Kbps | 360 Kbps | 13x |
starfall.com | 67.30% | 90 Kbps | 4.6 Mbps | 52x |
medievalhistories.com | 81.90% | 233 Kbps | 42.7 Mbps | 55x |
adaptedmind.com | 96.20% | 111 Kbps | 6.2 Mbps | 56x |
outbrain.edu | 27.70% | 141 Kbps | 44.4 Mbps | 10x |
A year later Hollister's bandwidth contract was due for renewal. But the district was happily postponing that next step to 500Mbps – it was simply not needed. And with the budget saved from higher annual fees and network kit – the district could focus on maximizing its investment in devices, online curricula and new learning projects.
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.
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 had lowered bandwidth need dramatically. By serving up to 73% of all requests from the local cache, demand on the internet connection rarely reached above 15Mbps. It's CACHEBOX that met higher demand levels - at well over 40Mbps.
With internet usage so low, any bandwidth upgrade had been postponed indefinitely.
"I'm in shock of how low our need is after the CACHEBOX", says Jerry Butler, Tech Advisor to the district.
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 1Gbps 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 78% 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 - making a huge difference in the classroom for teachers and students.
Keokuk Community School District, IA
5 Schools | 1,859 Students | LOCALE | 1Gbps
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'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.
4 Schools | 2,400 Students
Suburban | 650Mbps
As much as half of the district's network traffic consisted of software updates. But with CACHEBOX, once one copy of an update had been downloaded, more than 90% of future requests were served locally. With that capacity freed up, Gilmer's students got much faster access to priority content.
Domain | Total Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
Overall | 17.95 TB | 8.84 TB | 49.2% |
windowsupdate.com | 3.14 TB | 3.00 TB | 95.4% |
adobe.com | 2.00 TB | 1.97 TB | 98.7% |
edgesuite.net | 8.88 TB | 1.70 TB | 19.2% |
microsoft.com | 1.20 TB | 1.13 TB | 94.0% |
apple.com | 0.83 TB | 0.37 TB | 45.7% |
hudl.com | 0.23 TB | 0.13 TB | 56.8% |
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 - handled 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 was served locally via the LAN, it was delivered at lightning fast LAN speeds.
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.
After deploying CACHEBOX, complaints about slow video had vanished. Those problematic updates for apps and devices had been off-loaded from the internet connection, freeing up significant capacity for core learning content.
With large amounts of learning content served locally – at LAN speeds – the classroom experience was much quicker. And with all that unused capacity available, anything still coming direct from the internet arrived faster too.
Domain | % Served from Cache | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|
discoveryeducation.com | 48% | 23x |
apple.com | 80% | 15x |
nationalgeographic.com | 68% | 10x |
sharpschool.com | 99% | 5x |
microsoft.com | 75% | 5x |
google.com | 83% | 4x |
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 paid over $10,000 per month for 1Gbps bandwidth - enough to secure 236kbps per student and a responsive service.
However, the FCC had 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 had 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 had been dramatically slashed.
All that unused capacity meant more room - for more content, more devices, whatever the district needed. For the cost of just over a month's bandwidth, Delano had extended the life of its current capacity as well as its network infrastructure - saving tens of thousands of dollars.
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.
4 Schools | 4,235 Students
Rural | 1Gbps
By deploying CACHEBOX, the school had 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 could 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 was made available for the content that matters. Since deployment 12 months ago, Pyramid Lake had 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.
Clarksville ISD's rural Texas location meant bandwidth was expensive. Already paying more than $3k every month for 100Mbps, even a small increment would impact precious learning budget.
But with 620 Chromebook, iPad and PC users - and whole classes that accessed the same web content simultaneously - demand often spiked way above capacity. This led to congestion and slow network speeds, which impacted learning.
Clarksville Independent School District, TX
3 Schools | 547 Students
Rural | 100Mbps
But for just 1/12th of the annual cost of bandwidth, CACHEBOX handled the district's most popular content - by storing copies of it and serving it locally – so that repeat requests were taken off the WAN and delivered over the LAN.
Domain | Volume Requested | Volume Cached | BHR % |
---|---|---|---|
windowsupdate.com | 33.8GB | 24.8GB | 73% |
apple.com | 7.41GB | 1.76GB | 24% |
microsoft.com | 22.5GB | 9.17GB | 41% |
symantecliveupdate.com | 5.30GB | 3.60GB | 68% |
CACHEBOX postponed the need for more bandwidth - saving Clarksville from an annual increase in the 10s of $1000s.
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.
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 were updated locally, without consuming bandwidth. For the Academy, results were instant – a faster web experience and no video buffering.
By meeting up to 50% of Apple and 75% of Microsoft update demand, and ~40% of all online content, capacity was reclaimed for the content that matters.
Domains | Traffic Volume (GB) | % served from cache | Speed from web | Speed from cache | Speed increase |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Apple | 182.5 | 43.8% | 296kbps | 514kbps | 1.7x |
Microsoft | 94.5 | 91.7% | 28kbps | 454kbps | 16.5x |
Windows | 54.7 | 72.4% | 222kbps | 1.1Mbps | 4.9x |
Norton | 13.7 | 68.0% | 2.2Mbps | 3.4Mbps | 1.5x |
Sophos | 2.4 | 70.0% | 938kbps | 51.2Mbps | 54.7x |
A growing private school district in suburban Des Moines, Iowa, DMSC handled 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 was 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 had cut bandwidth usage dramatically. These huge updates were delivered from cache, slashing internet use by 60-70% each month. Apple updates alone accounted for two thirds of all monthly traffic, but up 86% of these were 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.
Domain | Volume (GB) | Served from Cache (GB) | BHR |
---|---|---|---|
apple.com | 1320 | 1133 | 85.8% |
microsoft.com | 108 | 88 | 81.0% |
google.com | 45 | 30 | 66.2% |
Franklin already spent $1700+ each month for 300Mbps web access – any higher and the cost would have impacted other school priorities. Yet the addition of more user devices was squeezing capacity beyond its limits.
When more devices were added it's not just learning traffic that grew. Each device regularly downloaded 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 was 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 could happily stay at 300Mbps. No need for an upgrade, even when planning 1:1 for the entire district.
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.
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 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. ~89.5% of Taft's larger capacity remained available for the content that mattered – videos and educational content continued to arrive faster.
Southwest Barry Community School District R5 paid $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 was nowhere near what the school required at peak times.
By deploying CACHEBOX, actual peak demand had been revealed. Requests for 275Mpbs of data had been reported during peak times with CACHEBOX serving 195Mbps on top of the 80Mbps from the district's connection.
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 was available to the school at a more sustainable price.
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.
1 School | 973 Students
Urban | 500Mbps
TCDP is a technical school with a 500Mbps connection and approximately 1,000 network users, meaning it does not meet the SETDA's 2022 target of 2.8Mbps per student. CACHEBOX doubles the effective capacity compared to the internet connection alone, enabling 5Mbps 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
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.
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.
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 was reclaimed. This resulted in testing season flying by without a hitch.
2 Schools | 600 Students
Rural | 100Mbps
Domain | % Served from Cache |
---|---|
microsoft.com | 65.8% |
adobe.com | 53.6% |
apple.com | 44.0% |
In terms of cost-saving, the district were paying $3,000 per month for an 80Mbps internet connection.
By deploying caching, it benefited from the equivalent of 275Mbps and, because the cost of CACHEBOX is less than a few month's bandwidth, the district paid a far more affordable price per Mbps.
2 years later, the district were able to purchase a more affordable bandwidth contract, at a significantly better price than if they had upgraded at the time they purchased their cache.
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.
2 Schools | 161 Students
| 175Mbps
But, because it is provided by the state, 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 had slashed demand on its internet link.
CACHEBOX served the majority of learning content locally – as much as 90% and higher. A single downloaded copy could meet multiple requests instantly, without consuming further bandwidth. With the internet free of congestion, there was no need to postpone e-learning until the next upgrade. In fact, the district could do more – at much faster speeds.
By serving learning content locally, it reached students at much faster LAN speeds – making a huge difference in the classroom. The user experience was lightning fast in comparison. Apex Learning - a core curricular platform that had been particularly unreliable - was 14 times faster than from the internet. Other core learning content was up to 36 times faster!
Learning Content | % Served from Cache | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|
Storyline Online | 65.8% | 36x |
Pearson Testing | 90.9% | 22x |
Reading Bear | 83.5% | 16x |
Apex Learning | 64.4% | 14x |
AbcYa! | 90.0% | 6x |
"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
Back in 2017, 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 their 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.
10 Schools | 3,128 Students
Rural | 3Gbps
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.
Now in 2022 things are only getting better. Not just learning content but large software updates demanded by PCs and tablets are being served locally. In March 2022, 1.07TB of downloads for Microsoft updates alone were requested. However, CACHEBOX met 1.04TB of that demand from cache, so only 3% needed to come directly from the internet.
With CACHEBOX, Alcorn has consistently slashed demand on its bandwidth capacity - by as much as 86%. Since June 2021, an average of just 13% of its internet capacity has been needed – the majority is being served from cache.
In rural Montana, bandwidth often comes at a high price. Ronan pays almost $2,000 for a 700Mbps connection to cater for its 1,472 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.
4 Schools | 1,472 Students
Rural | 700Mbps
To cater for rising demand the FCC recommend Ronan upgrade capacity to 1.5Gbps - but such a fast connection would be too costly.
Instead, with CACHEBOX, Ronan has put their speed issues behind them, and without upgrading.
Domain | Speed from web | Speed from Cache | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|---|
valleyjournal.net | 81.4Kbps | 15.0Mbps | 185x |
stencyl.com | 116Kbps | 16.4Mbps | 141x |
supercoloring.com | 156Kbps | 7.61Mbps | 49x |
flatheadwatershed.org | 438Kbps | 16.5Mbps | 38x |
microsoft.com | 873Kbps | 20.7Mbps | 24x |
creativelearningsystems.com | 312Kbps | 6.37Mbps | 20x |
windowsupdate.com | 1.15Mbps | 18.7Mbps | 16x |
google.com | 225Kbps | 2.29Mbps | 10x |
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... 49x, 141x, even 185x 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 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.
9 Schools | 2,100 Students
Urban | 550Mbps
To fix the congestion problem, the district deployed a CACHEBOX420 and the appliance had served over 50% of all web requests - offloading large duplicate software update traffic from the internet connection. In fact, CACHEBOX consistently kept the district's traffic below 500Mbps, avoiding the need for an expensive bandwidth upgrade.
It also enabled the district to meet peak traffic demand without having to upgrade bandwidth. Including the modest cost of caching, Browning got significantly more affordable capacity and delivered faster access to online content in class.
Claremont Unified School District is an Apple flagship customer in southern California. The district's 5Gbps internet connection was routinely congested with operating system software updates. Despite most of the students using exclusively Apple products, its existing Apple caching system was only able to serve 50% of their software updates. These updates were clogging the district's bandwidth connection and leaving teachers unable to deliver their lesson plans.
Apple was unable to offer a simple and effective technical solution that would resolve the school district's connectivity issues.
Claremont Unified
School District, CA
10 Schools | 7,000 Students
Urban | 5Gbps
CACHEBOX resolved the district's connectivity issues by serving data-heavy computer updates for all the district's 10 school sites from the local network at LAN speeds. In fact, after deployment, the district's director of technology reported that CACHEBOX used 91% less bandwidth during the last round of Windows updates.
Domain | Traffic Volume | Traffic Served from CACHEBOX | % of Traffic Served from CACHEBOX |
---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 984GB | 897GB | 91% |
office.net | 178GB | 169GB | 95% |
gvt1.com | 137GB | 124GB | 91% |
windowsupdate.com | 80.0GB | 72.3GB | 90% |
apple.com | 78.4GB | 50.8GB | 65% |
Total Traffic in August | 1.56TB | 1.39TB | 89% |
The school district is regularly seeing 80-90% of content served from cache and has reported that CACHEBOX consistently performs better than its Apple caching servers, with a connection six-times faster than downloading updates from the internet.
"The performance of the CACHEBOX vs Apple Cache is significant, in terms of both TOC to manage Apple Cache and the quality of the caching done," says Damon Rapp, Director of Technology.
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.
3 Schools | 1,200 Students
Suburban | 500Mbps
CACHEBOX continued to serve as much as 96% of bandwidth-heavy content like huge, duplicate operating systems that were demanded by hundreds of student devices.
Domain | Traffic Volume | % Served from Cache | Speed from web | Speed from Cache | Speed increase |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 310 GB | 95.7% | 484 Kbps | 2.7 Mbps | 5.5x |
windowsupdate.com | 228 GB | 94.5% | 588 Kbps | 6.6 Mbps | 11.3x |
google.com | 210 GB | 58.2% | 436 Kbps | 593 Kbps | 1.4x |
Rather than saturating the school's connection, Microsoft and Chromebook updates were offloaded - freeing up capacity to support even more learning content or devices.
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.
3 Schools | 1,300 Students
Rural | 300Mbps
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.
"We purchased the CACHEBOX as we were moving to 1 to 1 devices to ease the transition with Apple and Chromebook updates. It was a much cheaper option than upgrading our bandwidth."Brenton Wolfe, Technology Coordinator
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.
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 accessed the content they needed at lightning speeds. By serving content from local cache, including bandwidth-intensive video, internet demand was dramatically lowered - freeing up precious capacity. A single download met multiple requests instantly, delivered at LAN speeds - making classroom access responsive and fast.
Domain | Bytes Hit % | From Web (Mbps) | From Cache (Mbps) | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|---|---|
ja.org | 78.4 | 0.04 | 9.5 | 214.0 |
africanculturalcenter.org | 84.0 | 0.01 | 1.8 | 143.0 |
house.gov | 57.2 | 0.05 | 2.7 | 51.0 |
galegroup.com | 50.1 | 0.16 | 3.1 | 20.0 |
schoolcheckin.com | 29.9 | 3.60 | 66.3 | 18.0 |
apexlearning.com | 49.3 | 0.29 | 2.9 | 10.0 |
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.
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.
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.
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 were offloaded, and any upstream web latency is avoided.
With CACHEBOX Hannibal had dramatically accelerated learning content – it wasn't just 2 or 3 times faster, but 15, 22 even 97 times faster!
Domain | % Served from Cache | From Web (Mbps) | From Cache (Mbps) | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|---|---|
rosettastone.com | 92.0% | 0.12 | 120.5 | 97x |
bbc.co.uk | 90.7% | 0.13 | 43.4 | 34x |
starfall.com | 84.5% | 0.14 | 44.4 | 32x |
adaptedmind.com | 97.2% | 0.10 | 21.6 | 22x |
hannibalclinic.com | 94.2% | 0.23 | 42.7 | 18x |
And by slashing demand on its internet link, Hannibal had freed up lots of space for more bandwidth-hungry content such as YouTube videos. Teachers were delighted to include video in lesson plans again.
Brookfield Christian School in Milwaukee serves 288 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, WI
1 School | 288 Students | Urban | 100Mbps
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 maximise bandwidth and accelerate their internet speed.
The school first deployed CACHEBOX in 2017 and now, 5 years later, the school is still on the same bandwidth and with savings that have tripled. During this month the district saved significant bandwidth by caching software updates for its expanded fleet of devices. CACHEBOX has served a total of 102GB worth of content in September 2022 to the school, a total that would have taken the school 3 hours to download through its internet connection.
Domains | Total Traffic | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
securly.com | 12.2GB | 12.0GB | 98% |
google.com | 104GB | 70.0GB | 67% |
microsoft.com | 20.7GB | 13.0GB | 63% |
gvt1.com | 7.52GB | 4.77GB | 63% |
windowsupdate.com | 4.58GB | 2.12GB | 46% |
Overall | 151GB | 102GB | 68% |
School District of Black River Falls in Wisconsin has a 1Gbps connection shared across its two Elementary Schools, Middle School and High School, which is essential for delivering its 1:1 e-learning program.
However, with a growing number of devices connecting to the network and downloading software updates in the background, students and teachers were facing frustrating delays when accessing educational resources and YouTube videos.
School District of Black River Falls
5 Schools | 1,714 Students |
Suburban | 1Gbps
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 at higher speeds.
The results are impressive. For six consecutive months, Black River Falls offloaded an average of more than 80% of all internet traffic to local cache, including a peak of 98% in November.
Deeper analysis shows that, along with updates from Google and Microsoft, CACHEBOX is improving access to the school's e-learning Management Systems (Sharp School and SMART Technologies).
Domain | Served from Web | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 675GB | 646GB | 96% |
google.com | 274GB | 235GB | 85% |
windowsupdate.com | 111GB | 92.8GB | 84% |
gvt1.com | 80.2GB | 70.9GB | 88% |
With their educational resources available at increased speed over the school's LAN, rather than having to be downloaded from the Internet each time, students are learning far more effectively - without having to wait for web pages and videos to load.
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.
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.
At Brandon School District in Michigan, 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 Google were consuming bandwidth, resulting in slow access to digital learning and video content. With 10-15% more network devices expected in the coming years, the situation was likely to get worse.
8 Schools | 2,824 Students | Suburban | 10Gbps
Domain | Overall Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
Total Traffic in Sep | 1.4TB | 1.1TB | 74.1% |
google.com | 1.1TB | 854.7GB | 77.7% |
microsoft.com | 130GB | 98.5GB | 71.4% |
gvt1.com | 100GB | 93.1GB | 93.1% |
apple.com | 27.9GB | 12.2GB | 43.7% |
windowsupdate.com | 16.8GB | 13.3GB | 79.4% |
The school chose a CACHEBOX420 to tackle its bandwidth hogs and increase browsing speed. Since deployment in October 2017, the results show significant bandwidth savings on software updates from Google (79%), Microsoft (71%), Android (93%), Windows (79%), and Apple (43.7%). As a result, the average speed of internet requests has increased by up to 10 times – providing students and staff with faster access to digital content in the classroom.
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.
1 School | 323 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
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.
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 was being served at much higher speeds. Readingeggs was an online repository of reading activities, and the increase in delivery speed of data served from cache was over 800 times faster!
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.
2 Schools | 630 Students | Rural | 1Gbps
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.
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.
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.
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.
462 Schools | 322,601 Students | Suburban | 30Gbps
After installing CACHEBOXes, Miami-Dade found 97% of requests for learning content 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 had 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.
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.
4 Schools | 1,965 Students | Suburban | 1Gbps
This meant 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.
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.
3 Schools | 673 Students | Rural | 85Mbps
The school had 85Mbps and needed around 120Mbps on average during the school day. At peak times it needed almost 700Mbps. At the $50 per Mbps that the district already paid, Durant would need to spend over $30k per month extra!
By investing $7,000 in CACHEBOX230 Durant had been able to serve up to 682Mbps with just an 85Mbps connection.
The district could 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
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 knew that, on the occasions that demand exceeded 250Mbps, CACHEBOX would be able to help. The graph below shows that, for the majority of the time, 250Mbps was sufficient to handle demand. At times, they have needed 650Mbps which is just over FCC target at 110Kbps per student. Caching had 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.
4 Schools | 6,190 Students | Suburban | 250Mbps
Woodland's CACHEBOX solution cost $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 paid for itself in 4 months and saved the district and FCC over $100k in its full lifecycle!
In a rural setting, Highland Local Schools would struggle to meet the FCC's 100Kbps per student target without spending a very large proportion of budget on bandwidth capacity. Fortunately, CACHEBOX offers a smarter way to guarantee fast content to students.
By storing content locally and serving it from within the LAN, Highland Schools avoid the potential causes of slow content like network congestion or a content provider's slow web server.
3 Schools | 1,645 Students |
Rural | 500Mbps
Domain | Scheme | Traffic Volume | Traffic from Cache | % Served from Cache | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
coolmathgames.com | https | 56.1GB | 26.3GB | 47% | 21.9x faster |
schoology.com | https | 29.1GB | 19.5GB | 67% | 6.2x faster |
dell.com | https | 21.3GB | 14GB | 66% | 1.1x faster |
ixl.com | https | 15.1GB | 10.1GB | 67% | 1.9x faster |
quizlet.com | https | 1.77GB | 788MB | 44% | 498.7x faster |
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.
Even with 10Gbps link that is underutilized, it is caching that delivers the responsive browser that the classroom demands
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 | 8,173 Students | Suburban | 15Gbps
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 55% 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.
Top Domains | Overall Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
apple.com | 1.43 TB | 781 GB | 55% |
microsoft.com | 842 GB | 670 GB | 80% |
epicgames.com | 454 GB | 289 GB | 64% |
gvt1.com | 270 GB | 260 GB | 96% |
windowsupdate.com | 173 GB | 140 GB | 81% |
Overall | 4.04 TB | 2.26 TB | 56% |
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, SC
23 Schools | 16,202 Students | Suburban | 2Gbps
With CACHEBOX, Pickens was able to support over 7,700 devices on its 2Gbps bandwidth link, including student and staff laptops, desktops and interactive Promethean boards. BYOD had been fully enabled without congestion, and rather than delays in content delivery, speed in the classroom had increased.
A significant proportion of educational content was served from cache - see table, below.
Domain | Total Traffic (Gb) | From Cache (Gb) | % Cached |
---|---|---|---|
google.com | 429.9 | 370.6 | 86.2% |
coolmath-games.com | 143.5 | 135.6 | 94.5% |
pbs.org | 158.7 | 91.2 | 57.5% |
abcya.com | 10.5 | 10.2 | 97.5% |
sharpschool.com | 6.1 | 5.7 | 91.7% |
disney.com | 5.0 | 3.9 | 82.2% |
With up to 80% of traffic served from cache - up to five times as much data as from the internet - no increase in bandwidth had been needed.
And because that content is served at LAN speeds, delivery in the classroom had been accelerated up to 600 times faster than delivery from the internet.
Having paid out for extra bandwidth capacity that put them well above the FCC bandwidth target, Westwood CSD's 2016 allowance of 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 didn't deliver the speedy web access students needed. That's because bandwidth is just one of the many factors that influence the speed of access to content.
2 Schools | 520 Students Rural | 3Gbps
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 saw the impact of this in Westwood's caching reports. Despite having ample bandwidth, the PBSkids content that came directly from the internet averages just 62kbps. Whereas the content served from cache was delivered at 541kbps, 8.6 times faster.
Some sites showed 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.
Domain | From the Internet | From CACHEBOX | Speed Increase (Times) |
---|---|---|---|
starfall.com | 9.8Kbps | 870.7Kbps | 89.0x faster |
fun4thebrain.com | 7.1Kbps | 418.5Kbps | 59.0x faster |
media.abcya.com | 25.8Kbps | 772.5Kbps | 29.9x faster |
roomrecess.com | 9.6Kbps | 223.6Kbps | 23.4x faster |
pbskids.com | 62.7Kbps | 541.8Kbps | 8.6x faster |
Now, 6 years since they deployed a cache Westwood has upgraded its internet connection from 250Mbps to 3Gbps . By deploying a cache, they were able to delay this upgrade until prices fell significantly – where they paid $20 per Mbps for a 250Mbps connection, they pay just 1c per Mbps for 3Gbps.
As we know, a very high capacity connection – even one this large – does not guarantee fast access. With CACHEBOX quietly delivering 60% BHR, Westwood now plans a cost-effective hardware upgrade to maintain its caching service and the high speed access to content that students and teachers enjoy.
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 was able to deliver content at high speed far more cost-effectively.
39 Schools | 32,643 Students | Suburban | 4Gbps
Domain | From web (Mbps) | From CACHEBOX (Mbps) | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|---|
stjohns.k12.fl.us | 0.88 | 131.94 | 149.8 |
primarygames.com | 1.57 | 45.74 | 29.2 |
bing.com | 1.35 | 34.15 | 25.3 |
discoveryeducation.com | 2.05 | 41.45 | 20.2 |
apple.com | 3.38 | 49.70 | 14.7 |
With CACHEBOX deployed, the majority of content was accelerated. Web content served locally from CACHEBOX was consistently many times faster than content served directly from the web.
St John's caching report for May 2017 highlighted the impact of caching on core learning content from Pearson, Discovery Education, PBS Kids, abcya.com and more.
Most classroom content was served between 5 and 30 times faster from cache.
The result was 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.
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.
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 delivered 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:
Domain | Traffic Volume (MB) | % of Total Traffic | % from Cache | % Traffic Offloaded |
---|---|---|---|---|
Overall | 70513 | 100.00% | 69.7% | 69.7% |
mbamupdates.com | 41780 | 59.25% | 95.5% | 56.6% |
windowsupdate.com | 8619 | 12.22% | 53.4% | 6.5% |
google.com | 3706 | 5.26% | 76.0% | 4.0% |
apple.com | 1470 | 2.08% | 22.6% | 0.5% |
nccisd.net | 875 | 1.24% | 42.1% | 0.5% |
adobe.com | 422 | 0.60% | 28.4% | 0.2% |
s3.amazonaws.com | 177 | 0.25% | 70.9% | 0.2% |
microsoft.com | 143 | 0.20% | 33.1% | 0.1% |
texas.gov | 127 | 0.18% | 35.3% | 0.1% |
mcafee.com | 103 | 0.15% | 38.5% | 0.1% |
mozilla.net | 94 | 0.13% | 78.3% | 0.1% |
googleusercontent.com | 68 | 0.10% | 99.5% | 0.1% |
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" said 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."
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 34,000 students to serve, St. Paul Public School District spent over a quarter million dollars on bandwidth every year. This investment delivered 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
100 Schools | 34,000 Students | Urban | 30Gbps
By serving content from cache, the district instantly alleviated peak utilisation of the previously strained 1Gbps WAN link, serving 80% of traffic directly from within each school's network.CACHEBOX eliminated congestion, leaving only 100-200Mbps for the WAN to handle.
In addition to bandwidth optimisation, by serving locally, CACHEBOX also sped up the education content that matters:
Importantly, online testing via TestNav was served 8 times faster, ensuring that those schools unable to get high capacity WAN links were not at a disadvantage.
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.
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
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.
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 could download and store just a single copy of content locally. This satisfied all subsequent requests at lightning fast LAN speeds - without consuming more bandwidth.
Acceleration in the classroom saw prime education content from Google, ABCya!, Fun4theBrain, Starfall and more, arrive 50, 100 and even 333 times faster!
Domain | Served from Web (GB) | Served from Cache (GB) | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
Overall | 833.79 | 440.87 | 52.9% |
google.com | 234.41 | 197.45 | 84.1% |
abcya.com | 61.51 | 57.62 | 93.7% |
funforthebrain.com | 7.88 | 7.21 | 91.6% |
starfall.com | 6.98 | 6.45 | 92.4% |
The offload in traffic was instant. With over half of overall content served from cache, the district freed up capacity for other content or for even more users.
Caching effectively doubled existing bandwidth capacity. North Palos got the fast, reliable service it needed, without needing to ban content or pay for an expensive bandwidth upgrade.
Newcomerstown district in rural Ohio pays almost $2,000 per month for a 200Mbps connection to serve 961 students across 4 schools. Despite reaching it's '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.
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 would also deliver poor value for money.
By deploying CACHEBOX, a highly affordable, E-Rate eligible 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.
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.
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.
In suburban New Mexico, Los Lunas School District delivers e-learning to 7,834 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.
15 Schools | 7,834 Students
Suburban | 2Gbps
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 2022, after Los Lunas upgraded its bandwidth to 2Gbps, CACHEBOX continues to perform well – saving an average of 90% bandwidth month to month.
"Despite of some calls from my team to get rid of CACHEBOX, I'm glad I didn't. Without it, the software updates would take over our network and cause issues. I'm thankful that this solution offsets the need for more bandwidth. We have 2Gbps, but we peak out at 1.5Gbps, all thanks to CACHEBOX. We'd be at 3Gbps by now if not for it. Throwing bandwidth at the problem is inefficient and messy."
Top Domains by Data | Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
threattrack.com | 5.52TB | 5.51TB | 99% |
apple.com | 1.40TB | 1.37TB | 97% |
microsoft.com | 1.23TB | 1.21TB | 98% |
windowsupdate.com | 169GB | 154GB | 91% |
cdn-apple.com | 23.9GB | 21.5GB | 90% |
All domains (total) | 9.79TB | 8.90TB | 91% |
Conemaugh Township, located in rural Pennsylvania, served 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.
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 was the ideal fix – not just then, but for future traffic growth as well. 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 was performing even better - caching 67% of the total network traffic. And because large files like Microsoft updates were delivered to users locally, at LAN speeds – they often arrived 85 times faster than from the internet.
Top Domains | Overall Traffic Volume | Traffic from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
Overall | 891 GB | 597 GB | 67% |
microsoft.com | 409 GB | 390 GB | 95% |
google.com | 126 GB | 86.6 GB | 69% |
windowsupdate.com | 76.2 GB | 27.4 GB | 36% |
By offloading such huge amounts of software updates traffic from its network, CACHEBOX was facilitating e-learning at Conemaugh, ensuring its students got faster access to critical online content.
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 the current capacity wouldn't be enough – risking the success of its learning initiative.
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 met the majority of requests from cache.
By serving content locally, Esko was 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
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 was 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 had been slashed.
And, with updates being served direct to users' devices at much faster LAN speeds, they cleared the network many times faster. So the district could free up even more bandwidth for core learning content and those extra devices when they arrived.
Top Applications | Traffic Volume (GB) | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|
Windows | 59.1 | 73% |
Avast | 6.2 | 64% |
Mozilla | 2.1 | 89% |
Abcya | 1.2 | 81% |
1.2 | 24% | |
ACT Aspire (Testing) | 0.9 | 96% |
Avast cdn | 0.6 | 70% |
Microsoft | 0.6 | 25% |
Office (Microsoft) | 0.3 | 89% |
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.
6 Schools | 3,655 Students
Suburban | 1Gbps
Results at Dartmouth were 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 had accelerated not just learning content, but problematic software updates too.
Domain | % Served from Cache | Speed from Web | Speed from Cache | Speed increase |
---|---|---|---|---|
gomarcopolo.com | 100% | 0.07 Mbps | 7.69 Mbps | 108x |
hoodamath.com | 90% | 0.16 Mbps | 3.55 Mbps | 22x |
apple.com | 63% | 0.03 Mbps | 0.65 Mbps | 21x |
classzone.com | 89% | 0.29 Mbps | 4.58 Mbps | 16x |
adobe.com | 86% | 0.13 Mbps | 1.73 Mbps | 13x |
microsoft.com | 72% | 0.13 Mbps | 1.54 Mbps | 11x |
google.com | 77% | 0.09 Mbps | 0.70 Mbps | 8x |
windowsupdate.com | 76% | 0.09 Mbps | 0.67 Mbps | 7x |
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 had deployed five CACHEBOX appliances across its five sites, which were 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.
Domain | Total Traffic (GB) | Traffic from Cache (GB) | Traffic from Cache (%) |
---|---|---|---|
googlevideo.com | 985.5 | 883.4 | 90% |
google.com | 1.7 | 0.9 | 52% |
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 cached more content than any other solution - results had 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 had more than halved demand – leaving plenty of room for more devices and traffic as 1:1 rolled out – all without increasing its bandwidth allocation.
Top Domains | Overall Traffic Volume | Traffic served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 71.7 GB | 54.9 GB | 76.6% |
google.com | 27.2 GB | 16.3 GB | 60.0% |
edgesuite.net | 27.0 GB | 24.1 GB | 89.4% |
gvt1.com | 14.9 GB | 8.1 GB | 54.2% |
windowsupdate.com | 14.0 GB | 11.0 GB | 78.4% |
gptbirds.org | 9.0 GB | 9.0 GB | 98.0% |
nickjr.com | 1.3 GB | 0.6 GB | 51.1% |
Total school traffic | 247.8 GB | 134.9 GB | 54.4% |
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 served 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 had given the district room to expand content and user numbers for years to come - on just 500Mbps. Hampton-Dumont's plans for future upgrades were now far less than other schools.
Month | Overall Traffic Volume | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|
July | 189 GB | 90% |
August | 2.04 TB | 85% |
September | 1.15 TB | 86% |
October | 3.36 TB | 87% |
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.
5 Schools | 2,318 Students
Urban | 2.5Gbps
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!"
Spring Cove SD runs comprehensive digital 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. After 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 is delivered many times faster than from the web. Core learning content from netexam.com, study.com, xtramath.org is around 50 times faster. Learning videos are often 120 times faster – but educational gaming content reaches over 300 times faster!
Learning Domain | Speed from Web | Speed from Cache | X times faster |
---|---|---|---|
spritted.com | 292Kbps | 90.3Mbps | 309.1x |
dishanywhere.com | 75.5Kbps | 14,4Mbps | 191.1x |
dailymotion.com | 1.30Mbps | 158Mbps | 121.4x |
mrgober.com | 638Kbps | 50.0Mbps | 78.3x |
netexam.com | 46.3Kbps | 2.46Mbps | 53.1x |
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.
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 could be suspended.
Top Domains | Overall Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
gvt1.com | 4.2 TB | 4.2 TB | 99.6% |
apple.com | 3.2 TB | 2.6 TB | 81.0% |
microsoft.com | 301 GB | 272 GB | 90.6% |
google.com | 296 GB | 219 GB | 74.1% |
cdn-apple.com | 281 GB | 138 GB | 49.2% |
sharpschool.com | 155 GB | 154 GB | 99.9% |
adobe.com | 102 GB | 36 GB | 35.6% |
windowsupdate.com | 66 GB | 46 GB | 69% |
abcya.com | 50 GB | 48 GB | 96.9% |
Total District Traffic | 9.1 TB | 7.8 TB | 85.8% |
Located in rural New Jersey, Washington Township School District caters for its 419 students and 90 staff members with a 500Mbps connection.
With digital 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.
2 Schools | 419 Students
Rural| 500Mbps
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 74% on total network traffic, consistently offloading multi-gigabytes of Apple, Microsoft and Windows 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.
Top Domains | Overall Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 86.3GB | 74.8GB | 87% |
apple.com | 34.4GB | 19.6GB | 57% |
windowsupdate.com | 3.19GB | 2.70GB | 84% |
gvt1.com | 2.23GB | 1.29GB | 58% |
Overall | 137GB | 101GB | 74% |
Having worked with various caching solutions in the past, including Squid and Apple cache, Systems Integrator, Michael 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!"
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.
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 was served directly over the LAN it arrived at much faster LAN speeds, and cleared the network quickly, leaving students with more premium congestion-free e-learning experience.
Top Domains | Overall Traffic Volume | Traffic served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 148.1 GB | 127.3 GB | 85.9% |
adobe.com | 10.4 GB | 8.3 GB | 79.6% |
office.net | 1.2 GB | 0.8 GB | 70.5% |
google.com (Chromebooks) | 37.7 GB | 25.7 GB | 68.1% |
gvt1.com (Chromebooks) | 12.8 GB | 8.0 GB | 62.5% |
Total Traffic | 370.0 GB | 193.8 GB | 52.4% |
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 thousands of users regularly accessing online content, the network has been slowing down.
12 Schools | 4,393 Students
Urban| 5Gbps
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.
Of the 13.4 terabytes of total content requested from right across the district, CACHEBOX served 54%, effectively multiplying existing bandwidth, and enabling a faster, more responsive classroom experience.
Domains | Scheme | Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|---|
threattrack.com | http | 6.17TB | 6.17TB | 99% |
gvt1.com | https | 154GB | 140GB | 91% |
mit.edu | https | 47.6GB | 31.6GB | 66% |
gstatic.com | https | 87.9GB | 52.0GB | 59% |
coolmathgames.com | https | 96.3GB | 54.6GB | 57% |
Overall | 13.4TB | 7.26TB | 54% |
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.
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. Staffing changes resulted in under-resourcing, therefore 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 caching performance reports showed CACHEBOX offloading so much data, only 133Mbps was 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
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 | 615 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 69% 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.
Top Domains | Overall Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
adobe.com | 41.0GB | 40.5GB | 99% |
gvt1.com | 37.0GB | 33.3GB | 90% |
microsoft.com | 110GB | 89.9GB | 82% |
apple.com | 846GB | 586GB | 69% |
google.com | 182GB | 104GB | 57% |
Overall | 1.28TB | 875GB | 69% |
"CACHEBOX sits and does its job well. I just let it be. "Leslie Rullman, Tech Director
Worth School District caters for over 900 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 900 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.
4 Schools | 932 Students
Suburban | 1Gbps
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 70% of all in-demand content locally, including HTTPS content and bandwidth-heavy video, as well as software updates for all devices in use.
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 was 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 had eliminated congestion and improved the classroom user experience.
Top Domains | Overall Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 9.84TB | 10.9TB | 99% |
windowsupdate.com | 749TB | 9.69TB | 92% |
gvt1.com | 336GB | 692TB | 65% |
google.com | 247GB | 217GB | 68% |
cdn-apple.com | 107GB | 169GB | 40% |
Total | 11.7TB | 10.9TB | 93% |
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Top Domains | Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
apple.com | 5057.9GB | 4927.1GB | 97.4% |
cdn-apple.com | 1042.7GB | 948.1GB | 90.9% |
microsoft.com | 76.1GB | 53.7GB | 70.5% |
gvt1.com | 45.9GB | 40.5GB | 88.1% |
windowsupdate.com | 8.3GB | 3.7GB | 45.2% |
Total Cached | 6.4TB | 6.0TB | 93.9% |
Apple Domains | Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
apple.com | 5.06TB | 4.93TB | 97.4% |
cdn-apple.com | 1.04TB | 0.95TB | 91.3% |
Total Apple | 6.10TB | 5.88TB | 96.4% |
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 was far quicker. No student waits for content anymore. Caching results had been so good, the school switched off its Apple Caching.
At its largest performing arts campus, Vine, CACHEBOX was 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 was happily caching 96.4% of it. User experience was as good as it gets.
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.
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 was delighted.
Top Domains | Overall Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 1,488.2GB | 1,484.2GB | 99.7% |
windowsupdate.com | 100.5GB | 78.6GB | 78.2% |
google.com | 91.6GB | 58.1GB | 63.4% |
gvt1.com | 21.4GB | 14.9GB | 69.6% |
smarttech.com | 5.8GB | 3.8GB | 64.6% |
Traffic | 1,842.6GB | 1,661.5GB | 90.2% |
Despite a new bandwidth contract giving more capacity, the school was finding it wasn't using it. Having upscaled its CACHEBOX to match the higher throughput, it was 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 had also made a big difference in speed. Not just because so much capacity had been made available for content but also because serving it locally meant serving it at LAN speeds, not internet speeds. Learning content served from cache was arriving many times faster – as high as 400 times faster.
Top Domains | Speed from the internet | Speed from Cache | X times faster |
---|---|---|---|
faceingmath.com | 0.12Mbps | 51Mbps | 413x |
math-aids.com | 0.12Mbps | 17Mbps | 140x |
uhistory.org | 0.09Mbps | 10Mbps | 107x |
playspent.org | 0.11Mbps | 9Mbps | 81x |
spellingclassroom.com | 0.06Mbps | 3Mbps | 56x |
"“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
In rural New Mexico, Dexter provides e-learning to over 800 students across 3 campuses. Despite having a seemingly sufficient 1Gbps 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 | 887 Students |
Rural | 1Gbps
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.
With CACHEBOX 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 receive most 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 enjoying a premium, more engaging user experience.
Top Domains | Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 2.18TB | 2.11TB | 97% |
bitdefender.net | 361GB | 351GB | 97% |
gvt1.com | 251GB | 231GB | 92% |
google.com | 244GB | 188GB | 77% |
windowsupdate.com | 112GB | 102GB | 91% |
Total Cached (Overall) | 3.19TB | 3.00TB | 94% |
"Our internet connection is small and without CACHEBOX the internet speeds are slow."Diana Rivera, Director
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
5 Schools | 1,911 Students |
Rural | 1Gbps
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 2022, with a new school building and additional Chromebooks for students, the district is enjoying 1Gbps 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 5 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.
Domain | Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
adobe.com | 2.05GB | 2.03GB | 99% |
gvt1.com | 96.6GB | 94.6GB | 98% |
sharpschool.com | 1.89GB | 1.86GB | 98% |
google.com | 1.11TB | 936GB | 84% |
windowsupdate.com | 57.4GB | 48.2GB | 84% |
microsoft.com | 412GB | 294GB | 71% |
Overall | 1.78TB | 1.38TB | 78% |
"Bandwidth was so slow before we purchased CACHEBOX, we immediately noticed a big bump in our network speeds and so did the students!"Richie Williams, IT Manager
The third largest public school district in Alaska, with a huge geographic region to match, Fairbanks North Star Borough keeps learning 'centred' on its 12,000+ 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 | 12,000 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.
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 showed 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 could 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.
Domain | % of traffic volume | % served from Cache | Speed from the web | Speed from cache | Speed increase |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 57% | 59% | 1.1 Mbps | 21.6 Mbps | 20x |
windowsupdate.com | 20% | 76% | 381 Kbps | 13.2 Mbps | 34x |
gvt1.com | 10% | 35% | 2.8 Mbps | 76.2 Mbps | 21x |
adobe.com | 0.3% | 80% | 7.7 Mbps | 76.2 Mbps | 10x |
Content that matters to students and teachers was no longer forced to queue. As software updates to student devices arrived more quickly, traffic cleared the network sooner, eliminating saturation and extending the life of Pretty Eagle's existing bandwidth.
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.
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 could make the most of its existing investment.
Domain | Scheme | Bytes Volume | Bytes Volume | % served from cache | Speed from web | Speed from Cache | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | http | 1.15 TB | 1.14 TB | 99% | 1.87 Mbps | 8.45 Mbps | 4.5x |
google.com | http | 62.1 GB | 42.6 GB | 69% | 214 Kbps | 770 Kbps | 3.6x |
google.com | https | 51.6 GB | 19.8 GB | 38% | 125 Kbps | 404 Kbps | 3.2x |
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 | 2,986 Students |
Suburban | 1Gbps
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 100 times faster than from the internet – even on the districts higher speed link. Steve is so glad his curiosity overcame his lack of awareness.
Learning Domain | Speed from the internet | Speed from Cache | X times faster |
---|---|---|---|
mathskey.com | 28.1kbps | 3.12Mbps | 112x |
ninjaflex.com | 55.4kbps | 5.54Mbps | 100x |
connatix.com | 322kbps | 31.0Mbps | 96x |
species-identification.org | 102kbps | 9.08Mbps | 89x |
educationplanner.org | 311kbps | 13.4Mbps | 43x |
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 3Gbps, 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.
3 Schools | 1,652 Students |
Local | 3Gbps
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 50, 60, even 77 times faster!
Top Domains | Speed from web | Speed from Cache | Speed increase |
---|---|---|---|
seobook.com | 127Kbps | 9.71Mbps | 77x |
readingforeducation.com | 403Kbps | 25.0Mbps | 62x |
giftofreading.org | 199Kbps | 10.0Mbps | 51x |
avast.com | 48.7Kbps | 1.86Mbps | 38x |
tech4learning.com | 188Kbps | 6.26Mbps | 33x |
tcschools.com | 88.8Kbps | 2.78Mbps | 31x |
creativelearningsystems.com | 345Kbps | 4.83Mbps | 14x |
microsoft.com | 166Kbps | 2.03Mbps | 12x |
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.
9 Schools | 4,795 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.
Top Domains | Overall Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
adobe.com | 7.21GB | 7.21GB | 99% |
gvt1.com | 82.4GB | 79.8GB | 97% |
google.com | 3.24TB | 2.87TB | 89% |
apple.com | 389GB | 339GB | 87% |
microsoft.com | 330GB | 284GB | 86% |
smarttech.com | 3.00GB | 2.53GB | 85% |
windowsupdate.com | 31.7GB | 25.4GB | 80% |
Overall | 4.24TB | 3.64TB | 86% |
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 February 2022, 86% of all content was served from cache. Up to 99% 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.
Hamilton Unified School District in rural California caters for 730 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.
3 Schools | 730 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.
Top Domains by Data | Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 583GB | 507GB | 87% |
windowsupdate.com | 61.7GB | 53.4GB | 87% |
crazygames.com | 6.22GB | 4.35GB | 70% |
office.net | 17.6GB | 15.9GB | 91% |
splashmath.com | 21.2GB | 19.6GB | 92% |
All domains (total) | 1.31TB | 872GB | 67% |
Thanks to CACHEBOX, the district is now offloading an average of 67% of internet demand locally, including duplicate requests for huge software updates for the many district devices.
Happy with the service he receives, Frank hasn't hesitated to share his thoughts: "I have to say, the team at ApplianSys may be the best support that I've worked with. I greatly appreciate you and your teammates. It feels like there is genuine care about the customer and their solution."
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. This result gave the district the option to add additional user devices whenever they're ready, without it impacting learning for everyone else.
Top Domains by Data | Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
windowsupdate.com | 1033.9 GB | 1006.7 GB | 97.4% |
adobe.com | 445.8 GB | 434.7 GB | 97.5% |
apple.com | 234.3 GB | 128.8 GB | 55.0% |
microsoft.com | 64.2 GB | 47.2 GB | 73.6% |
pbs.org | 30.2 GB | 24.2 GB | 80.1% |
windows.net | 30.2 GB | 30.1 GB | 99.7% |
abcya.com | 17.2 GB | 16.4 GB | 95.2% |
All domains (total) | 2451.4 GB | 18.6 GB | 73.9% |
With CACHEBOX effectively boosting existing capacity locally, those huge spikes of internet traffic had been quashed. With up to 74% of all traffic being served locally, huge swathes of capacity had been freed up. Congestion had vanished, as too complaints from the classroom.
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.
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 countless devices in use daily, demand for the internet was slashed. Even with huge increases in traffic, CACHEBOX was meeting the majority of demand from cache. By September 2019, some appliances were serving an average of 86% of all demanded content.
Top Domains | Overall Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
google.com | 137.2GB | 123.2GB | 89.8% |
gvt1.com | 1.9GB | 1.1GB | 60.2% |
activsoftware.co.uk | 1.5GB | 1.5GB | 99% |
adobe.com | 0.2GB | 0.2GB | 76.6% |
mozilla.net | 0.2GB | 0.1GB | 63.7% |
All domains | 145.9GB | 126.5GB | 86.7% |
With so much capacity reclaimed for other things, or additional users, content was free to arrive unhindered.
But thanks to CACHEBOX serving it locally – at far faster LAN speeds – content was also being accelerated. Learning content which would otherwise trickle down the internet at mere Kbps was arriving up to 215 times faster.
Top Domains | Speed from internet | Speed from Cache | X times faster |
---|---|---|---|
newenglandhistoricalsociety.com | 0.04Mbps | 8.1Mbps | 215x |
math-aids.com | 0.08Mbps | 13.9Mbps | 184x |
engineeringedu.com | 0.08Mbps | 9.4Mbps | 115x |
sciencecareerpathways.com | 0.11Mbps | 10.9Mbps | 99x |
poetrybyheart.org.uk | 0.17Mbps | 15.2Mbps | 88x |
With 224 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 | 224 Students |
Urban | 400Mbps
Rather than upgrade its 400Mbps 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 70% 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 August 2022, 94% of Microsoft content was served from cache. What's more, that content arrived many times faster than from the internet.
Top Domains | Overall Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 538GB | 504GB | 94% |
stambroseonthehill.com | 100MB | 93.5MB | 93% |
windowsupdate.com | 56.0GB | 48.7GB | 87% |
digicert.com | 2.60GB | 2.19GB | 84% |
gvt1.com | 26.9GB | 22.3GB | 83% |
Overall | 675GB | 578GB | 86% |
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.
Despite a recent bandwidth upgrade, students and teachers at Plato R-V in rural Missouri couldn't access online content quickly enough. A new deployment of 400 1:1 Google Chromebooks meant 500 users now needed access to the internet daily - but the rise in traffic was causing congestion.
IT Manager Cayl Steinbrink suspected Chromebook updates were the likely cause, so he looked for a specialized cache to help alleviate download traffic. Neighboring schools in Missouri recommended CACHEBOX.
3 Schools | 559 Students |
Rural | 1Gbps
Once deployed however, CACHEBOX reports revealed gaming content as a hidden bandwidth hog. The growth of the district's Esports Club has been meteoric, and content downloads for games have often been the #1 consumer of the district's internet data.
Video game 'from-cloud' installation and update files are notoriously huge, regularly 25-50Gbps and often much higher. Nationwide, they are consuming more and more of schools' bandwidth.
However, CACHEBOX's unique caching technology takes these in its stride. Up to 72% of Plato's gaming demand is now met from cache.
That's even more impressive when you consider that gaming traffic accounted for 76% of monthly data volume (639.2GB of 730GB).
Top Domains – Games Content | Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
blizzard.com (gaming) | 378GB | 272GB | 72% |
microsoft.com (inc Xbox updates) | 104GB | 89.8GB | 87% |
akamaized.net (gaming CDN) | 86.8GB | 68.2GB | 79% |
epicgames.com (gaming) | 60.5GB | 30.3GB | 50% |
steampowered.com (gaming) | 931MB | 635MB | 68% |
Total (games) | 639.2GB | 460.9GB | 72.1% |
Cayl is delighted by CACHEBOX's gaming performance, "CACHEBOX is great for our gaming updates. I don't know how our network would function without it!"
Fremont RE-2 school district in Colorado adopted 1:1 learning quicker than most, but that meant countless user devices demanding fast access to Apple, YouTube and learning content, as well as software updates. With up to 1,362 students online at any one time, even its upgraded 200Mbps internet link could not cope. Network saturation during the school day caused delays and complaints from the classroom.
Fremont School District
RE-2, CO
3 Schools | 1,362 Students |
Suburban | 1Gbps
Director of Technology Darrin Tingey estimated iPad software updates were accounting for 40% of that demand, so he looked to offload it with Apple Caches. However, that had little impact on bandwidth consumption, so Darrin turned to CACHEBOX, hoping it would help with caching far more content.
As CACHEBOX specialises in caching learning content, video and multi-vendor software updates, Fremont instantly offloaded the majority of its classroom demand. With 78% of Apple updates and learning content - as well as updates from Microsoft and Windows - now served from local cache, bandwidth usage has been slashed and congestion eliminated.
Fast forward to today, and Fremont has been busy replacing Apple devices with Chromebooks. Despite upgrading bandwidth to 1Gbps and replacing devices, all that new traffic is being capably handled by CACHEBOX.
In February 2022, content from Google including updates for Chromebooks has overtaken Apple content, yet CACHEBOX is successfully offloading up to 92% of Chromebook updates and averaging 83% of everything else – keeping the network free for other content.
Top Domains | Total Traffic | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
gvt1.com | 24.9GB | 23.0GB | 92% |
google.com | 835GB | 750GB | 90% |
microsoft.com | 269GB | 226GB | 84% |
apple.com | 84.2GB | 65.4GB | 78% |
windowsupdate.com | 68.9GB | 51.7GB | 75% |
Overall | 1.36TB | 1.12TB | 83% |
Recognising the benefits of caching, Newcastle's tech team sourced its CACHEBOX through E-Rate. The team hoped that by choosing the #1 federally-funded caching appliance, more classroom content would be offloaded than alternatives - freeing up room for additional users.
The team has been delighted by CACHEBOX's impact on the network. Once deployed, CACHEBOX proved its worth instantly, offloading additional demand from new devices as students returned to school for 20/21's first trimester.
3 Schools | 2,300 Students |
Suburban | 1Gbps
Despite the terabytes of varying traffic requested district-wide, from August to December 2020, CACHEBOX offloaded an average of 88% of total demand. Serving so much content locally is keeping connectivity free and the user experience fast.
Newcastle has plans to upgrade to a 5Gbps connection but, impressed by its performance, the district will also upgrade CACHEBOX throughput to support an expected 1,000+ simultaneous users.
South Carolinian Greenwood School District 52 began to roll out Chromebooks to 1,600 students in a new 1:1 scheme. In preparation for the scheme, it decided to increase bandwidth to cope with the influx of devices in the network.
Having upgraded from 200Mbps to 500Mbps, Greenwood was still experiencing congestion and internet slow down during peak times.
Greenwood School District 52, SC
4 schools | 1,600 Students |
Rural | 500Mbps
Further bandwidth expansion wasn't an option for Greenwood, as it'd reached the maximum bandwidth available. Instead, the district opted for a local cache to free up the bandwidth for state testing and educational content.
By satisfying content demands locally, CACHEBOX allowed Greenwood to not only cache its congesting Chromebook updates, but also the updates for Windows and Apple devices already in the network. The district also saw some surprising savings in other software such as anti-virus and Adobe - something the tech team hadn't taken into consideration.
Greenwood was able to serve an average of 86% of Chromebook updates (google.com) locally during the first half of 2021. In addition, the district was also benefiting from savings of other devices in the network doing updates in the background, notably Windows and Apple devices.
Domains | Overall Traffic Volume | Volume served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
google.com | 1373 GB | 1185 GB | 86% |
microsoft.com | 662 GB | 579 GB | 87% |
cdn-apple.com | 214 GB | 61 GB | 29% |
gvt1.com | 165 GB | 125 GB | 76% |
adobe.com | 137 GB | 129 GB | 94% |
windowsupdate.com | 103 GB | 77 GB | 75% |
avcdn.net | 70 GB | 44 GB | 63% |
avast.com | 57 GB | 19 GB | 33% |
TOTAL | 2781 GB | 2219 GB | 80% |
With so much capacity liberated, teachers and students were enjoying a premium, more engaging user experience.
As Tech Director at Sublette County SD #1, Chris Rule has long recognized the benefit of caching, so much so he used to custom-build his own.
He first deployed a proxy server over 2 decades ago, in 1999. But hands-on DIY experience had meant wasted labor and stress getting it to perform with school content.
In 2014, tired of the manual intervention needed to maintain his DIY servers, he switched to a dedicated CACHEBOX. Now, his time is his own and his school's performance is guaranteed.
Sublette County
School District #1, WY
5 schools | 1,064 Students |
Rural | 1Gbps
Chris continues to advocate for every school to use caching. In a 2021 presentation to Wyoming Tech Directors, he described how important it is for districts to optimize bandwidth with caching, even if they already benefit from high-capacity internet connections.
He demonstrates how:
Nome City School District decided to become a Google District, but it was clear that the 75Mbps internet connection would never support all the Google platform features or remote learning meant to be used at 1:1 levels.
Systems Administrator Jim Shrieve quickly identified that the bandwidth connection was saturated. More devices meant more large software updates were hogging the bandwidth during school hours – students and teachers were left frustrated as classroom video content became painfully slow to access.
5 schools | 700 Students |
Rural | 75Mbps
However, with Alaska's notoriously expensive internet prices, an upgrade to the FCC's 1Mbps per student was prohibitively out of budget. And as internet usage grew, the district would soon find its bandwidth congested and need to upgrade again.
So Nome City introduced two CACHEBOX210es to offload popular and bandwidth-intensive content. The results are impressive – bandwidth demand is slashed, freeing up capacity for classroom content. And with CACHEBOX's Media Library feature, important learning materials like heavy video or media files are now accessed instantly by students, without any buffering or stalling.
The district now supports a full Google 1:1 device programme on their existing bandwidth, and classroom bandwidth complaints have vanished.
Domain | Overall Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
google.com | 169GB | 99.8GB | 59% |
microsoft.com | 52.0GB | 25.9GB | 50% |
apple.com | 19.3GB | 11.8GB | 61% |
neverware.com | 271GB | 245GB | 90% |
windowsupdate.com | 5.14GB | 3.52GB | 68% |
All domains (total) | 637GB | 486GB | 76% |
Jim is delighted with the performance:
"The gains experienced through the CDN and caching have had a positive impact on our rural AK network capabilities - not to mention the bonus in the ability to finally deliver video to student devices via the Media Library."
East Baton Rouge (EBR) sourced its CACHEBOXes through E-Rate. The team knew that by choosing the only caching solution that supports HTTP and HTTPS delivery for popular educational content, much more classroom content would be accelerated than by alternative solutions.
CACHEBOX more than delivered on its promise. Once deployed, bandwidth consumption in the district's central distribution center was slashed by 70 – 90% per month.
East Baton Rouge
Parish Schools, LA
83 schools | 37,143 Students |
Urban | 25Gbps
With 37,000 students on a mix of Chrome, Windows and Apple devices, bandwidth-hungry software updates were the biggest drain on EBR's network.
In August 2022, CACHEBOX delivered 12.5TB of content from the district's most popular domains alone. And, because the content is already in the LAN, it is served significantly faster than content downloaded directly from the internet – while leaving the connection free for browsing and learning data.
Domain | Served from Web | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
microsoft.com | 8.97TB | 8.58TB | 96% |
apple.com | 271GB | 247GB | 91% |
windowsupdate.com | 214GB | 181GB | 84% |
google.com | 3.93TB | 3.26TB | 83% |
gvt1.com | 323GB | 243GB | 75% |
Overall | 14.6TB | 13.0TB | 89% |
But the savings did not stop there. East Baton Rouge launched an 'Esports for all' program in 2021 and CACHEBOX makes for the perfect gaming partner. Content from gaming websites like Epic Games and Blizzard is served through the cache, arriving at faster speeds and leaving the connection free for browsing and learning data. This ensures an optimal esports experience for students, without putting other student learning at risk.
Domains | Served from Web | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache | Speed Increase |
---|---|---|---|---|
xboxlive.com | 70.8GB | 26.3GB | 37% | 13 times |
epicgames.com | 482GB | 264GB | 55% | 3 times |
blizzard.com | 190MB | 74.5MB | 39% | 3 times |
steamcontent.com | 17.0GB | 893MB | 5% | 3 times |
Pearsall Independent School District subscribes to a 10Gbps internet connection but, due to throughput limitations on network infrastructure kit, it is only able to use 2Gbps.
The district's internet connection offers great value at 9c per Mbps. But, as other districts are finding, upgrading internet capacity into the multiple gigabytes comes with hidden costs and limitations. To access the full capacity of its connection, Pearsall would need to upgrade its Firewall to one that is capable of handling 10Gbps.
Pearsall Independent
School District, TX
5 schools | 2,247 Students |
Town | 2Gbps/10Gbps
With this expensive Firewall upgrade factored into the internet cost, the value is significantly reduced. The impact in the classroom is even more pronounced: rather than delivering a healthy 4.4Mbps per student, students are getting less than 900Kbps – less than FCC's 2018 target.
Thankfully for Pearsall, students had lightning-fast access to content because the district had already deployed a CACHEBOX which was delivering over 90% of traffic from within the LAN.
And because Pearsall had deployed CACHEBOX between students and the underpowered kit, the amount of traffic that the equipment needed to handle had been reduced, delaying the need to upgrade it. What's more, CACHEBOX was accelerating traffic by over 7 times – the district was getting the equivalent of 14Gbps from just the 2Gbps that was available from its internet connection.
Unlike the falling cost of internet access, Firewall, Filter, Router and Switch prices are largely static. For many districts, gaining access to even more capacity is no longer the no-brainer it was. "The brute force 'throw more bandwidth at it' approach has never really fixed schools connectivity problems" says Chris Newman, ApplianSys K-12 consultant. "Once a district reaches 1Gbps, technology leaders need to factor the cost of infrastructure upgrades into any plans to increase bandwidth".
"Multigigabit access is no longer limited to urban locations. Rather than simply getting as much bandwidth as they can, technology leaders must consider which of their connectivity investment options will make the most difference. I've yet to find a district that would get better value from a connection upgrade than a cache."
$62 million per year - that's how much Lower Kuskokwim School District (LKSD) pay for a 725Mbps connection to share between 4,073 users in 26 schools. And with 22 of these schools in villages that are only accessible by air or sea, up to 100 miles away from the core, upgrading the small 25Mbps links that support them was simply not an option.
LKSD had relied on Bluecoat caches to save bandwidth, but maintenance was expensive and the caches were not able to keep up with the changing, complex nature of modern K-12 internet traffic – they did not enable the schools to use e-learning as intended.
Lower Kuskokwim
School District, AK
26 schools | 4,073 Students |
Rural | 725Mbps
The district needed a solution that would reduce demand on the bandwidth available to each village school, eliminate unwanted traffic, and allow them to control bandwidth usage by specific users, content and applications.
To enable each school to use e-learning content and platforms with its existing internet connections, LKSD deployed low-cost CACHEBOX130es and CACHEBOX210es in small remote schools and a larger CACHEBOX310 at the headquarter in Bethel.
The district also installed a CACHEBOX Central Management Console (CMC) to allow its IT team to manage each appliance without needing to travel to the schools. Updates, changes, configurations and backups can all be performed in bulk without any local site admin.
CACHEBOX single-handedly allows LKSD to use media-rich content like in the YouTube in the classroom. Teachers and students are delighted with the performance – once stored in the cache, whole classes can watch videos in high quality without any buffering, leaving the rest of the connection free for other internet browsing and data.
And because CACHEBOX can differentiate between users based on Microsoft Active Directory (NTLM) records, the tech team have even more control over the content that students and teachers can access, adding to the bandwidth saving while maintaining needed filtering.
Complaints about slow speed were a headache for Yosemite Unified School district. The three 1Gbps connections to their rural schools would routinely max out on bandwidth and stop classroom internet access for the 1,600 users. But in the mountains of California, these connections already cost $250k per year – and even with help from E-Rate funding, the district did not have the budget to upgrade the lines to 5Gbps.
The district needed a solution that would quickly relieve its congestion problem, and avoid ongoing bandwidth increases as it used more online content. So they decided to purchase a CACHEBOX for each school, with excellent results.
Yosemite Unified
School District, CA
3 schools | 1,525 Students |
Rural | 3 x 1Gbps
For just 1% of Yosemite's annual internet cost, CACHEBOX immediately reduced the amount of bandwidth needed to support the internet by 30-50% each month. It served Terabytes of software updates, internet browsing and video content from the cache, at local network speeds, keeping the internet connection free for other high priority traffic.
Domain | Overall Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
All content | 745GB | 562GB | 75% |
microsoft.com | 214GB | 188GB | 88% |
deepfreeze.com | 159GB | 150GB | 94% |
google.com | 211GB | 123GB | 58% |
windowsupdate.com | 36.4GB | 25.3GB | 70% |
securly.com | 21.7GB | 21.6GB | 99% |
"Last year was a massive headache for me with complaints, but since we have put the CACHEBOXes in, I have had no complaints about bandwidth."
– Keith Greer, Information Systems Manager
Due to the improved performance, the school district did not need to upgrade to a 5Gbps connections to each site. They have now planned a single, non-urgent upgrade to the main site, representing a substantial financial saving for the school district.
Triton College's network was routinely congested by heavy software update and antivirus files. YouTube videos going viral across its 15,000 student campus would bring the network to a crawl. The college first tried to fix the issue by doubling their bandwidth – but the poor speeds persisted.
The main problem was 'peak' demand – when all devices downloaded the same content at the same time. To eliminate these spikes by adding bandwidth alone would have meant upgrading by many Gbps, at a huge cost.
1 campus | 15,000 Students |
Urban | 1Gbps
To solve the congestion, Triton deployed a CACHEBOX310, which only cost a fraction of the bandwidth required to cope with the downloads. There were no more network bottlenecks and students enjoyed fast web browsing, even on YouTube.
In 2020, when Triton college upgraded to a 1GB connection, the network team wanted to continue their winning bandwidth management strategy and upgraded to CACHEBOX420.
The college also enabled secure HTTPS caching, and is now seeing even better bandwidth savings of 75-85% per month.
As a result, CACHEBOX consistently keeps Triton's traffic below 400Mbps, avoiding the need for an expensive firewall upgrade.
Domain | Overall Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
All content | 6.13TB | 5.19TB | 85% |
apple.com | 703GB | 603GB | 86% |
windowsupdate.com | 616GB | 594GB | 96% |
gvt1.com | 472GB | 466GB | 99% |
windowsupdate.com | 36.4GB | 25.3GB | 70% |
google.com | 95.1GB | 65.3GB | 69% |
For Lindbergh Schools District, a BYOD scheme and the move towards a 1:1 pupil to computer ratio raised the challenge of how to effectively cater to a growing number of devices on its network.
Director of Technology Mariano Marin-Gomez explains: "In 2010 we introduced a 1:1 student-laptop initiative which added around 2,000 laptops to our network. The legacy caching servers we had in place stopped providing critical software updates. With our future scheme allowing students to bring their own devices to school, we were worried about how to cope with the pressure on bandwidth," says Mariano.
1 campus | 7,194 Students |
Urban | 10Gbps
Buying additional bandwidth was very expensive, so Lindbergh decided to upgrade its caching and turned to CACHEBOX to make the most of its existing bandwidth.
The district deployed two CACHEBOX310es, one in front of each of its two service provider links and since deployment, user browsing experience has dramatically improved.
Silver Consolidated School District in New Mexico enjoys a 5.4Gbps internet connection – over 2Mbps per student – but even this wasn't enough capacity to handle large software updates. When the school district's 2,500 student devices tried to update essential software packages at the same time, its bandwidth capacity simply could not cope.
Despite a reliable internet network being considered vital for learning, one in four students in New Mexico do not have internet access at home, which made it even more important for the school district to ensure sufficient capacity for students to access online content at school.
Silver Consolidated
School District, NM
10 buildings | 2,523 Students |
Suburban | 5.4Gbps
By deploying CACHEBOX, Silver has found a practical solution: the appliance saves a copy of content (like software update files) the first time it is requested and serves all the subsequent requests for the same content locally, without using the internet connection.
Now, Silver CSD serves between 60-90% of data-heavy software upgrades via its cache, speeding up internet access for all the district's schools, as well as leaving more bandwidth available for vital, online learning tasks.
Domain | Overall Traffic Volume | Served from Cache | % Served from Cache |
---|---|---|---|
All Traffic in August | 205GB | 169GB | 82% |
microsoft.com | 108GB | 96.2GB | 89% |
gvt1.com | 45.7GB | 39.3GB | 86% |
google.com | 34.7GB | 21.4GB | 62% |
windowsupdate.com | 10.0GB | 8.33GB | 83% |
digicert.com | 2.84GB | 2.39GB | 84% |
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!
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.
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.
Get in touch to start a conversation with a caching specialist about your connectivity needs.