Bandwidth goes far in Doha
ApplianSys is pleased to announce that Doha College, Qatar, has bought a CACHEBOX solution to facilitate its 1:1 student to device scheme.
The college has a 100 Mbps bandwidth link catering for over 1,800 students. However, the introduction of a BYOD scheme raised several concerns for IT Technician, Aneesh Judy.
“About a year ago, we purchased 1,000 iPads for students to use in the classroom. But in the last year, Apple software updates have been putting serious strain on the bandwidth. As a result, teachers are complaining about slow internet speeds and wasted classroom time.”
“Next year we will need to handle around 2,000 iPads. The bandwidth available is simply not enough to cope. We had a very expensive bandwidth upgrade, so another was not an option.”
Aneesh therefore decided that a caching solution was necessary to handle this and started looking into possible options.
“The first caching server we tried was difficult to use and didn’t give us the ability to generate useful reports. There were little signs of network improvement and no way of monitoring bandwidth. Meanwhile, software updates were becoming a growing concern: When all 30 students in the class accessed the same files simultaneously, the internet became unusable.”
We decided we had to look elsewhere, and that’s when I came across CACHEBOX. Once deployed, Aneesh was very pleased with the results.
“Having tested CACHEBOX in our network, we’re getting 30% average bandwidth savings. Internet speed in the classrooms is much faster, and teachers can continue their lessons without worrying about waiting for websites to load.”
CACHEBOX Sales Executive Harminder Heer comments: “CACHEBOX’s reporting functionality will make it particularly easy for Aneesh to monitor network usage and discover how the cache is performing.”
About
Established in 1980, Doha College, Doha, Qatar, is one of the oldest British curriculum schools in Qatar. It has over 1,800 students from 75 nationalities – between the ages of 3 to 18. It is sponsored by the British Embassy and is a not for profit organisation.