CACHEBOX beats bandwidth to Highland peaks

ApplianSys is pleased to announce that Highland Local Schools in Ohio has deployed CACHEBOX to give its classrooms fast access to digital content and avoid a hugely expensive bandwidth upgrade.

With around 3,000 students across five sites, Highland has a lot of internet users. Students have their own Chromebooks for independent learning in class to access educational content online.

As with most modern devices, these download large software updates in the background – and they were crippling the school’s 200Mbps connection. “Chromebook updates would result in three days of nearly unusable internet,” according to Assistant Technical Coordinator Dana Lehman. “Teachers said that learning games were ‘unplayable’ in class.”

Like most schools, Highland wanted to overcome these issues by increasing capacity, but the high cost of bandwidth in its rural setting meant that an upgrade was unviable. So Dana turned to CACHEBOX instead.

By storing a copy of internet content locally, CACHEBOX serves any repeat requests over the Local Area Network (LAN) rather than consuming more bandwidth. “I have been able to run software updates with almost no interruptions,” Dana said.

With up to 80% of content being served over the LAN, students can load sites such as pbskids.org five to ten times faster. What’s more, when internet demand is highest at the start of lessons, CACHEBOX is delivering three times as much effective capacity than the school’s current connection.

“We are delighted that CACHEBOX has helped Highland meet the demands of its students and deliver a more responsive learning experience, without having to pay for an expensive bandwidth upgrade,” stated ApplianSys Sales Executive, Brad Smith.

About

Highland Local Schools is a public school district located mainly in Medina County, Ohio, with a small portion in neighbouring Summit County. It provides education from pre-school up to K12 with three elementary schools, one middle school and one high school.