"Our bandwidth problems have been practically eliminated. Monitoring & customization is a snap with the web interface."
Desert Academy, Santa Fe, USA "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 "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 reports give us very clear indication of what traffic is doing – where we get biggest hits and where we can get the biggest savings."
Stuart Jones, Outwood Grange Academies Trust, UK "CACHEBOX makes a big difference when it comes to overcoming latency and increasing the speed of internet content"
Chris Rule, Technology Director, Sublette County School District #1, USA

Golf fans tour web with CACHEBOX

January 24, 2015
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Appliansys is pleased to announce that The PGA European Tour has purchased a CACHEBOX solution to improve web browsing speeds for tournament attendees.

The European Tour hosts 50 golf tournaments every year, attracting tens of thousands of spectators. At each event, its engineers set up a network of wireless hotspots to provide fast access to the internet for media and spectators, accommodating between 200-20,000 users. This isn’t easy, especially in remote areas where setting up a 24Mbps satellite connection is often their only option.

Graham Gifford, PGA European Tours’ ICT Director, identified two main destinations for web traffic: popular video sites, where spectators view shots made by players, and the organiser’s own website browsed for latest news, results, tournament schedules and players’ statistics. With latency commonly experienced at up to 800ms, the company turned to web caching.

“CACHEBOX is ideal for such traffic profiles: heavy static HTTP objects like the large images or videos available on PGA European Tour’s website can be cached and stored locally,” says Harminder Heer, ApplianSys Sales Executive. “But CACHEBOX also ensures that frequently updated objects, like the scoreboard, remain up to date. If the server has a cached copy of the scoreboard, it “asks” the origin web server whether it has been modified since. If so, an updated version of the object replaces the old one,” he explains.

In March 2014 PGA European Tours bought a CACHEBOX050 to test its performance. The appliance now travels with the tour and is redeployed at each new tournament venue, saving 40-50% of bandwidth at each event.
Following this success, PGA European Tour has purchased 2 larger CACHEBOX310s and plans to use them in a similar manner.

“Because CACHEBOX is really simple to deploy – much easier than other caching servers – PGA European Tour can quickly setup the infrastructure they need to provide better web browsing for golf fans, regardless of location,” comments Harminder.

About

Headquartered in Surrey, UK, the PGA European Tour operates a broad range services for the leading men’s professional golf tours in Europe. The European Tour International Schedule consists of 50 tournaments for the leading professional in more than 25 destinations with prize money of over €130 million. The PGA also runs the European Challenge Tour and the European Seniors Tour.