Lakewood floats faster web access

ApplianSys is pleased to announce that Lakewood City School District in Ohio USA, has deployed a CACHEBOX solution to rid its network of software update overload, freeing up bandwidth for a more responsive user experience.

Lakewood City, a large school district in suburban Cleveland, enjoys access to high-speed internet via a city-wide dark fibre consortium. Thanks to the portion made available to public institutions, the district benefits from two 1Gbps connections at lower cost.

5,000 users regularly access online content from its 11 campuses. However, students and teachers have been reporting that e-Learning content is often too slow to arrive in the classroom.

With thousands of Apple and Windows devices in use, Lakewood’s bandwidth is beset by daily requests for operating software updates. Though clearly essential in a school environment, the downloads were getting more frequent and larger in size.

With hundreds of gigabytes of bandwidth consumed by software, there’s been little room for learning content. And worse, the resulting congestion can easily last throughout the school day. But being tied to its contract with over a year left to run, Lakewood needed another way to stop congestion and free up capacity.

Caching helps offload demand by serving online content from local storage. In choosing CACHEBOX, the only fit-for-purpose school’s cache, Lakewood instantly benefitted from eliminated bandwidth congestion and faster speeds in the classroom. CACHEBOX is already offloading 80-90% of the terabytes of Apple and Microsoft downloads Lakewood’s devices demand each month.

“By deploying a CACHEBOX420 Lakewood has been able to offload masses of demand for software updates from each campus,” says CACHEBOX Consultant Marianne Cowie.
“Serving content locally frees up existing capacity, often substantially – enabling unrestricted access to educational content and a faster, more responsive classroom experience. All without changing your bandwidth contract.”

About

Lakewood City School District is an award-winning public school located in suburban Cleveland, on the shores of Lake Erie in Ohio, USA. A district of 7 elementary schools, 2 middle schools, a high school and a community charter school, Lakewood caters for over 5,000 students. Looking to create opportunity-rich environments for students to explore beyond the classrooms, the district relies on technology to play a vital part in widening the learning curriculum.