"Stable, redundant, out of sight, out of mind DHCP at its finest"
Kevin Williams, Director, Whittier Regional Vocational Technical High School, USA "You really don’t have to do much with CACHEBOX, it just sits in my network and caches"
Ignacio Rodriguez, Director, Childress Independent School District, USA "With DNSBOX, our previous IP conflict problems are non-existent."
Mike Neverdusky, CDE Lightband, USA "We had a very good experience during Pre-Sales discussions. Cool approach and volunteering to resolve our issue."
Udhaya Moorthi, Kal Cables Pvt Ltd, India "The failover to the backup line worked seamlessly thanks to DNSBOX"
James Carter, Senior Director, Nimbus Therapeutics, MA, USA

Cullman culls duplicate downloads

September 17, 2026
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ApplianSys is pleased to announce that Cullman City School District has deployed CACHEBOX, funded through E-Rate, to accelerate classroom content and take Chromebook updates off its network.

The district supports around 3,500 students across five campuses, on an estate that is almost entirely Chromebooks. Its campuses connect back to the core on a 10G link, soon to be upgraded to 40G, with 2Gbps from the core out to the internet.

That internet connection runs at around 80% utilisation, and the core upgrade was already planned, so capacity was not what the district was buying. Caching was bought to deliver classroom content faster and to take Chromebook update downloads off the network altogether.

Both are problems that more bandwidth handles poorly and caching handles well. Update traffic is almost entirely duplicated across a Chromebook estate, so a single local copy serves every device that follows. And content served from within the network arrives at LAN speed, avoiding the upstream delays that a larger connection does nothing to fix.

The district has deployed a CACHEBOX420, sourced through E-Rate with technology partner Synergetics DCS.

“The FCC is considering sunsetting E-Rate. Whatever it decides, a network built to carry the same download thousand times needs upgrading again and again, and each of those upgrades depends on funding that may not be there. Relying on bandwidth alone only looked safe while the money was certain,” says Chris Newman of ApplianSys, whose analysis of district caching data underpinned the company’s submissions to the FCC.