Caching frees up Newcomerstown's internet capacity

Shawn Dakin, Director of Technology, talks about how his school uses caching to cope with the growth in e-learning demand, avoiding expensive bandwidth upgrades.

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.