Expelled YouTube back in class at Kogi
ApplianSys is pleased to announce that Kogi State University, Nigeria, has purchased a CACHEBOX to boost its very limited bandwidth, accelerate slow content and bring back YouTube access in the daytime.
The university’s network supports 7 computer labs, an exam centre for 300 users, a BYOD network and countless other devices that sees concurrent access often rise to 1300 users. But with very limited bandwidth – just 10Mbps – demand quickly overwhelms the network and causes congestion.
Despite teachers keen to exploit YouTube video in lessons, the university has been forced to block access between 8am-6pm, when it’s needed most.
But even without YouTube – web access is just too slow to be usable. So a planned introduction of a new Learning Management System (LMS) to drive some of its academic platforms, risks failure before it’s even implemented. If students can’t access the content, the university fears they just won’t use it.
But with lots of budget going on an internal fibre network and the new LMS, Kogi wants to be cautious with capacity spend. Bandwidth is expensive. It wants to manage with smaller amounts in the short term.
Yakubu Ochefu has a history of working with e-education deployments, including helping coordinate Nigeria’s “Digital Bridge Initiative” deployments. Acting as ICT consultant for Kogi and several other state universities, he attended the e-Learning Africa conference in Kigali, where he first encountered CACHEBOX.
By storing the majority of online content locally, CACHEBOX slashes traffic on the internet connection, freeing up capacity for other content or more users. And because content is served via the LAN, it arrives at LAN speeds – many times faster than from the internet.
“Yakubu was so impressed by its potential to help deliver extra connectivity at lowest cost and give students the speed they really need, he introduced CACHEBOX to his university contacts,” says Marianne Cowie CACHEBOX Consultant, “And Kogi was the first to place an order.”
About
Established in Anyigba in 1999, Kogi State University quickly became Nigeria’s fastest developing university – student numbers have more than tripled in the last ten years. And despite less funding than federal government universities, it has been named one of the best universities in Africa, with some of its departments ranked by Nigerian professional bodies as the best in Nigeria.