K-12 TD advocates CACHEBOX in schools

ApplianSys is pleased to report that a hugely experienced school district Tech Director has shared powerful testimony for CACHEBOX at the 2021 Wyoming K-12 Tech Conference. Chris Rule and ApplianSys partner Bytespeed took to the stage to show other technology directors why every US school should optimise their network strategy with caching.

As Tech Director of Sublette County SD #1, Chris has used caching in schools for 2 decades having first deployed a proxy server in 1999. In 2014, tired of the manual intervention needed to maintain his DIY servers, he switched to CACHEBOX and continues to advocate for every school to use caching.

In his presentation, Chris described how important it is for districts to optimize bandwidth with caching, even if they already benefit from high-capacity internet connections.

He demonstrated how CACHEBOX’s caching profiles offloaded thousands of duplicate content requests, so he can ‘keep the water pressure in the plumbing’ for essential hybrid learning over Zoom and Teams during the COVID-19 school closures.

Demand for K-12 caching efficiency is growing

As more school networks adapt to 1:1 and BYOD schemes, and rely on increasingly more complex content, video and software updates, the network efficiency gained from caching technology has never been more relevant.

In 2021, 12.5% of districts now have over 3 times the 1Mbps per student target set by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and several have more than 100Mbps per student. But even on the biggest connections, ‘Peak’ demand at a school can see content requests skyrocket – causing congestion that cannot be relieved by buying more bandwidth.

Schools that deploy a cache to offload repeat content are able to dramatically slash their bandwidth demands, deliver much faster web access in the classroom and free up bandwidth to protect what matters.

Data from CACHEBOX’s user community shows schools save an average of 50.47% bandwidth, and the top 10% of US school districts consistently achieve over 80% savings.

Many K-12 Tech Directors and Superintendents have shared powerful testimony on the instant improvements seen on their networks, from faster web access in class to guaranteed performance for e-sports and equitable access to state testing.

 $1.2 billion savings per year

Most School Districts pay for internet connectivity using funding from FCC’s Universal Service ‘E-rate’ program. E-rate made caching eligible for funding in 2015 and ApplianSys’ soon-to-be-published research on 2021 K-12 bandwidth costs shows that the FCC could save $1.2 billion a year by installing caches in every school district.

However, the same research shows that 66% of US school districts are still unaware of the benefit that caching offers. “Many School Tech Directors believe that, once they’ve got what they think is enough bandwidth, caching is no longer necessary or beneficial” says Roger Clark, CACHEBOX product manager. “But experienced network managers like Chris Rule show just what they are missing out on. ApplianSys has worked with the FCC since 2017 to clarify the impact of caching and help the nation stretch its connectivity budget to provide more classrooms with reliable, fast access to web content.”

View Chris’ full presentation here: https://youtu.be/7HlgYzDKAHA

You can view more data from school district caching deployments on our dedicated microsites:

United States: http://why-schools-cache.appliansys.com/

International Schools, globally http://why-international-schools-cache.appliansys.com/