Trinity avoids unholy bandwidth mess

Almost a year after purchasing a CACHEBOX solution to support a struggling 1:1 scheme, Trinity School in Maryland is looking forward to another congestion-free school year.

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. Wait times for content immediately impacted the engagement levels the school was hoping for, and lesson plans suffered.

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 – demand that the school’s 50Mbps internet connection simply could not handle.

Capacity was further impacted by software updates as devices – in their hundreds – also began to simultaneously download large update files.

David Godfrey, Network Manager at Trinity, recognised that the school needed to increase capacity to cope, but also knew that upgrading bandwidth capacity was an expensive and, most likely, temporary solution. Fully expecting adoption of 1:1 teaching to rapidly expand, David knew demand would soon rise to fill any extra capacity.

So instead David looked into caching and found CACHEBOX to be the ideal, fit-for-purpose solution. Once deployed it became clear that Trinity needed 6-7 times their existing capacity to deal with peaks, but thankfully was now able to serve that demand locally from cache.

Since last year Trinity School has consistently saved bandwidth and, as adoption of digital content in the classroom has expanded, so has the percentage of content being cached, now as high as 80%.

“CACHEBOX is very much a schools-focused cache, designed to quash peaks in K-12 traffic by serving multiple, repeat requests locally and removing those bandwidth hogs that create congestion, such as software updates” said Brad Smith, CACHEBOX Sales Executive at ApplianSys. “Despite having an internet connection of only 50Mbps Trinity were able to satisfy student demand at levels reaching 350Mbps – that’s a 7-fold increase in effective capacity.”

About

Trinity School is a private Catholic school in Ellicott City Maryland. It is sponsored by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, and recognized by the Department of Education for excellence – twice awarded the National Blue Ribbon.

Find out how other US School Districts have benefited from deploying CACHEBOX at http://why-schools-cache.www.appliansys.com/