This will allow you to apply QoS to your connection to the internet, virtually eliminating P2P and any other bandwidth hogs. You can even throttle bandwidth so it is still usable by the students, but it doesn't eat up your entire internet connection
just to download a few songs from itunes. New fireless like the Cisco ASA also have QoS options. The difference from the packeteer and netenforcer is basically who has the better deal at the moment. Both companies will send you a 30 day demo box and I
suggest you try it out. I have had mine for 3-4 years now and love it.
Now a single T-1 is pretty slow for "a generation that lives and breathes technology." I would atleast bump it up to a bonded T-1 or get a secondary DSL service and keep the servers on the T-1 and the students on the DSL line. The DSL will be atleast
twice as fast as the T-1. A metro fiber/ethernet connection is starting to gain a lot of popularity recently and might be another option for you guys.
One last thing you might want to look at is some sort of web cache engine. Some of these not only cache web pages but also videos. I have a cisco cache/content engines and I get around a 35% savings on web traffic.
Focus on making your bandwidth as efficient as possible. Once you have that in place, then bump up the speeds if it is still needed.
Justin Dover
Harpeth Hall School
615-346-0082
A forum for independent school educators <ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU> on Friday, November 09, 2007 at 3:11 PM -0600 wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I am curious as to how boarding schools are dealing with the ever
>increasing appetite that students seem to have for bandwidth. We have
>160 boarders (95% have computers) and a T-1 that has served us well.
>During non-school hours students completely clog T-1 and I would love to
>say that it is educational use, however it is all I-Tunes, online TV
>viewing, and other bandwidth intensive recreational activities.
>
>The question that we struggle with is do we spend more money on
>bandwidth that would basically serve recreational purposes, or do we
>restrict usage on a generation that lives and breathes technology?
>
>We are currently in discussion as to how to deal with the issue and of
>course one of the first questions that is asked is, "What are other
>schools doing?"
>
>
>Thanks,
>
>Jeff Dayton
>Director of Technology
>The Madeira School
>jdayton@madeira.org
>703-556-8342
>
>[ For info on ISED-L see http://www.gds.org/ISED-L ]
>Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons, attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license.
>
[ For info on ISED-L see http://www.gds.org/ISED-L ]
Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons, attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license.
