Slash costs, maximize efficiency

Initiatives like COSNs Smart Education Network by Design recognize that districts must make joined-up decisions about technology investments to build sustainable networks that scale with demand.

Relying on the levels of funding made available during the pandemic to fund ongoing network costs is not a sustainable model.

By slashing the amount of traffic that uses a district's internet connection, caching:

• Reduces internet bills
• Delays costly upgrades for longer
• Maximizes existing investment in infrastructure

In fact, in its regular E-Rate Impact reports to FCC, ApplianSys has found that school districts purchased caches instead of bandwidth, they would save E-Rate $158m in 2021. Over the last five years, they would have spent $821m less. The brute force "throw more bandwidth at it" approach wastes significant public funding that could be re-allocated to services, like cyber security, that districts need but are not eligible for E-Rate.

As well as slashing connection costs, the knock-on effects of caching help districts design sustainable, scalable, efficient networks. This is clearly illustrated by growing costs for firewalls, filters and other devices that intercept network traffic and use throughput licensing models – because the cost of using these scale with the amount of data that they need to process. When a school increases bandwidth, it must either pay more for these licenses or they will find that they create a bottleneck which stops it from utilizing the additional bandwidth it has purchased. This is the situation that Pearsall Independent School District found itself in.

Learn more about how caching reduces costs and take our connectivity survey to help us build a richer picture of classroom connectivity for the FCC.