Web connection swamped no more

ApplianSys is pleased to announce that Vernon Parish School Board in Louisiana USA has deployed a CACHEBOX solution to successfully eliminate software update overload and deliver responsive 1:1 e-Learning district-wide.

In rural Louisiana, Vernon Parish recently rolled out its 1:1 student to device scheme across its 18 schools. Despite a 10Gbps connection for its 9,000 student PCs, Chromebooks and MacBooks, the user experience was far from ideal.

With the state’s curriculum primarily web-based, students and teachers rely heavily on access to media-rich content like video and state testing content. But with many thousands of devices accessing the same learning content concurrently, the district soon experienced a dramatic slowdown in web access. With long page-load times and buffering of YouTube videos, the quality of lessons was being jeopardised.

Even worse, with little control over online activity, teachers found their students frequently distracted by other on-page content such as ‘recommended videos’, unfiltered content and adverts. Thinking it might also help free up capacity, Vernon’s Tech Director blocked YouTube content altogether. But teachers felt it significantly disadvantaged classroom learning.

Further traffic analysis showed software updates from the growing number of devices was accounting for far too much traffic, consuming terabytes of bandwidth. With web access worsening, the district looked to caching to help offset demand.

Thanks to CACHEBOX Vernon now stores and serves most content locally and at faster LAN speeds. The district is already offloading terabytes of requested content each month – including almost 99% of testing content (DRC Testing). Latest caching reports also show impressive bandwidth savings for Microsoft – 99% of 10.5TB, Windows – 90% of 609GB and Google -73% of 403GB.”

Liberated from software updates, the district has now eliminated congestion and improved the user experience in the classroom.

“CACHEBOX meets repeats requests for content locally, stopping congestion from software updates occurring, and making room for richer e-learning content,” says Ilaria Mancinelli CACHEBOX Consultant. And thanks to CACHEBOX Media Library, online lesson content can now be collated by teachers in a secure environment and shared with students direct – eliminating all distraction from unwanted content or links at its original location.”

About
Vernon Parish School Board is a large school district headquartered in Leesville, Louisiana, USA. It operates all 18 public schools in the Vernon Parish area, catering for almost 9,000 full-time students. Its motto, “Every Child, Every Day, Whatever it Takes”, keeps the student at the centre of the educational process, of which e-learning opportunities play a key part.