More bandwidth doesn't guarantee speed in the classroom

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

Faster web access by maximizing existing capacity – no upgrade needed

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

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

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

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

Caching performance that grows as you grow

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

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

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

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

Significant annual savings with CACHEBOX

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

But CACHEBOX - recommended by neighbouring school Webb City - 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.

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

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

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

Delano, an award-winning school in California, seeks the ideal learning environment for its students, particularly its in-class e-learning user experience. That's why it 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.

Pyramid Lake Schools, NV

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

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

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

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.

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

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

CACHEBOX caches everything a school needs

A growing private school district in suburban Des Moines, Iowa, DMSC 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.

Only CACHEBOX can cache everything a school needs

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.

Arkadelphia deploys caching to work within state bandwidth contract limits

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

Caching enables more devices to connect at TAFT

With web demand growing, Taft Independent upgraded bandwidth 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.

Southwest Barry

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.

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.

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

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

Big Horn offloads big files for big savings

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

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

Southeast Webster offloads software updates for trouble-free online testing

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

But with CACHEBOX deployed speed and reliability was secured. By offloading bandwidth-intensive software updates for the district's many devices, much of the district's capacity was reclaimed. This resulted in testing season flying by without a hitch.

Slow public bandwidth bypassed with high speed caching

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

Alcorn lifts block on internet usage during state test season

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.

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

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.

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.

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 School District got faster web access for less $ per Mbps

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

With up to 800 devices connecting to the internet simultaneously, peak demand would spike to 2.4x the maximum bandwidth capacity. At peak times, the district needed 1.3Gbps - much of which was large operating system updates from Microsoft and Apple. With more demand than the network could handle, access to e-learning and video content was slow.

How much of your internet bandwidth remains after software updates?

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.

Caching delivers more as usage increases

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

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

900Mbps in classrooms with 100Mbps connection

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

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

Faster content from cache keeps Peoria's students engaged

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

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

Abundant bandwidth still outpaced by caching

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

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

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

CACHEBOX brings banned YouTube back to class

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

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

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!

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 lays the ground for enhanced digital learning

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.

Fast, free-flowing content at Black River Falls

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.

Internet speeds flying at Airport

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

Internet speed 10 times faster for growing school network

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.

Trinity School slashes peaks

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

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

Faster content, by an order of magnitude

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

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

North Ottawa Lions roaring about CACHEBOX

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.

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

Only CACHEBOX can guarantee that education content reaches students faster.

Sioux Central eliminates start-of-lesson peaks

Peak demand at the start of lessons meant Sioux Central Community SD internet link was often congested and painfully slow to use. Teachers reported that students trying to download the same video at the start of a lesson needed to wait for several minutes before being able to watch a single minute.

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

Equitably faster online learning county-wide

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

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

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.

Oak Grove cuts bandwidth requirement

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

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

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

The school 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

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

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

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

Fortunately, as a long-time CACHEBOX user the district 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.

Highland's students get faster priority classroom content

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

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

CACHEBOX outruns 10Gbps bandwidth

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glenbard reclaims capacity for education content

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

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

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.

BYOD enabled for Pickens County

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

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

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.

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.

Bandwidth ≠ speed

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.

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.

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.

Start-of-lesson peaks eliminated

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

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

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.

1:1 scheme enabled for Nueces Canyon

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

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

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:

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."

St. Pauls levels playing field with CACHEBOX

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

With 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.

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:

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

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.

Westwood students get much faster classroom content

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

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.

Caching frees up Newcomerstown's internet capacity

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.

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.

Caching delivers powerful e-learning experience at Calexico

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

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

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

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

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

Los Lunas offloads over 90% of bandwidth demand

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.

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."

CACHEBOX was handling 67% of total network traffic

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Stop Windows updates blocking web access – without upgrading

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

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

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.

A cast-iron solution for slow content.

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

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

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

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.

Video viewing vastly improved

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

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

Cambridge Isanti 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.

More bang for your buck

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Cache far more content with less effort

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

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

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

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

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.

Hidden software updates are hindering classroom access

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

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