"We rolled out 1200 Chromebooks to classrooms and CACHEBOX means that we haven't needed to increase our bandwidth."
Rodney Leer, Brenham Independent School District, USA "Our bandwidth problems have been practically eliminated. Monitoring & customization is a snap with the web interface."
Desert Academy, Santa Fe, USA "ApplianSys is the only vendor that takes the time to look at our appliances for us, and it really goes a long way."
Mike Caruso, Orland Park Consolidated High School District 230, USA "CACHEBOX boosted network performance and reduced bottlenecks. Loading issues across devices are all but gone."
Chris Zappe, Desert Academy, USA "We only had a 50Mbps connection and the teachers were streaming which put a strain on our network - CACHEBOX was really helpful when pages started to get cached"
Tony Venable, IT Director, Merritt Island Christian School, USA

No more Qatar congestion

April 22, 2018
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ApplianSys is pleased to announce that Qatar International School (QIS) now has fast, congestion-free access to e-Learning content thanks to CACHEBOX, which is providing up to 16x the capacity of its internet connection.

Fast and reliable internet access is very important for international schools like QIS: Students and families demand high-quality education supported by the latest technologies and resources.

Despite having upgraded its bandwidth twice (first from 16Mbps to 32Mbps and then to 50Mbps), because the number of student devices kept growing rapidly, the school’s internet pipe continued to be saturated. Software updates from Microsoft and Apple were consuming so much bandwidth they were causing slow internet access for students. At the start of lessons, when they needed to download key resources and learning materials, content was slowing to a crawl. The congestion was so bad, YouTube access had to be disabled in the classroom.

By installing CACHEBOX230 – a dedicated caching appliance for schools – QIS now has a sustainable solution that doesn’t require another bandwidth upgrade. It caches not only large amounts of learning content but problematic software updates too. So the school can serve requests directly over the Local Area Network (LAN), at high speed, without further downloads from the internet.

In just its first month of use (February 2018), CACHEBOX served almost 500GB of the near 1TB of content that students requested, reducing demand on bandwidth by 54%. In that same month Microsoft updates accounted for 372GB, however CACHEBOX served 361GB of that locally, leaving just 11GB to come from the internet – a reduction of 97%. Staff are also pre-loading teaching resources to the CACHEBOX Media Library before lessons begin, eliminating the need for some on-demand internet requests altogether.

At peak times, despite the school having only 50Mbps of bandwidth, CACHEBOX has satisfied demand for content at over 800Mbps – that’s 16 times its bandwidth capacity. Previously, that load would have crashed the internet, but CACHEBOX is meeting all demands, and serving it many times faster than from the internet.

According to Ashraf Sadiq, IT Manager at QIS, “After installing CACHEBOX, our problems went away. We have now unblocked YouTube, so teachers and students can watch videos in class. And we no longer need to think about expensive bandwidth upgrades. Finally, we really have the internet!”

ApplianSys CACHEBOX consultant Harminder Heer adds: ““CACHEBOX230 offers the perfect price/performance ratio for QIS. With support for up to 3,000 concurrent users, it meets their current needs and has room for growth.”

About

Qatar International School is an English-speaking private day school located in Doha, the capital city of the State of Qatar. It is one of the largest schools in the country with 1,900 students and 300 teachers.