Is there a data monster out there? SOMETHING is gobbling up bandwidth at an unbelievable pace. Supplying necessary bandwidth for our school districts is one of the biggest challenges we have in KY K-12 education. Of course, we aren’t alone. It’s an issue in places like Iowa and North Carolina. SETDA, the State Education Technology Directors Association, published a paper (rightly) comparing the need for broadband access to that of other utilities such as electricity, heating and air conditioning. I’ve had discussions with colleagues and asked if we’ll see the day where a school district cancels school due to the Internet connection being down. It won’t surprise me if that occurs.
Cherry-picking from my own observations and those in the linked content, there are a few obvious trends that have driven us to what seems to be a never-ending crisis of “not enough bandwidth”:
- More devices – In Kentucky, we’ve seen student/computer ratios go from an original vision of 6:1 down to about 2.5:1. Every teacher has a computer at their desk. If that were the only issue, that would be a challenge. Combine the influx of WiFi-connected devices such as smartphones and tablets and we’re now flipping ratios and asking about future plans for the number of devices per user rather than the number of users per device.
- More multimedia – I’ll spare you the “web 2.0” speech, but the reality is that Internet access – in terms of bits and bytes per second, is all about video (and some audio). As of January, YouTube had 4 billion views per day and 60 hours of uploaded video per minute. For Pandora radio (no video, mind you), you need at least 150Kbps per stream for reliable ‘normal’ audio quality. It’s still growing, accounting for 4% of all radio listening. The largest single source of Internet traffic in North America? Netflix.
Most education technology leaders have a healthy understanding of the problem. The challenge comes with solving the problem. These articles all speak to the need for more bandwidth. We’ve seen bandwidth availability increase, but more bandwidth certainly comes with a price tag. How much is enough? The SETDA article recommends 100Mbps per 1,000 students and staff as a minimum by 2014-15. We’re not even close to that. The Iowa article mentions Iowa City schools (12,454 students) having a 100Mbps connection. I can tell you that, depending on the district, Kentucky school districts are at similar or slightly better ratios to the Iowa example. We’re nowhere NEAR the SETDA recommendation.
The other ‘solution’ – which leads to healthy debate between Marty and myself – brings up terms such as “capping”, “rate limiting”, “throttling” and, dare I say it, “blocking and filtering” traffic. If it’s determined that 1/2 of your Internet traffic consists of YouTube, Netflix and Pandora, does that lead to a bandwidth upgrade or technical measures to curb that sort of usage? The answer depends on the school district and arguments can be made for and against the instructional validity of these sites.
Sometimes it feels to me like we’re living the technology equivalent of the “everyone flushing the toilet at the same time” conundrum. I like YouTube and Pandora, but the reality is that everyone in a school district using those sites at the same time crashes most systems. In fact, most conversations about this lead to utility analogies – “everyone can’t go to those sites at once, just like you wouldn’t want every light in every room to be turned on at all times.”
Maybe we can take the utility analogy a step further. From a billing perspective, mobile users are starting to be asked to pay for a certain amount of data per month. I won’t link the articles about unlimited data plans going away, but they’re out there. Most school districts are likely paying for a certain size of pipe – say, 100Mbps – and their provider may likely be oversubscribing with their other customers, assuming that not everyone will use their full capacity at once (the toilet analogy, right?) How is your electricity billed? Most likely, your home is a combination of a minimum bill followed by a charge for kilowatts used. In some businesses, there’s a combination of actual usage and a percentage of the bill derived from the ‘peak usage’ for a monthly period. If bandwidth is truly a utility, we’ll see the day where our fees are derived in a similar manner.
Is there REALLY a data monster? Yes… they’re everywhere.
My first response to this post is that School Districts are not ISPs… It is not the responsibility of a school district to provision access for World of Warcraft, Pandora Radio, Weatherbug, etc… If a district deems an application as educational then they should allow it… and even if they deem it non educational – I strongly believe that it shouldn’t necessarily be blocked but possible have a lower priority.
School Districts have invested millions in infrastructure and bandwidth but have not really focused on application provisioning.
Everything today is about application delivery and more and more devices looking to access such applications. The instructional side of the house and the IT side of the house are not always in line and must come together to decide how our students, faculty and staff can become better digital citizens of today’s Internet pipe…
Networks are a utility, and must be governed and not abused. An analysis of the bandwidth use during peak times would most likely show a large percentage of non-edu usage that could be reallocated towards edu usage and not continuing to throw money at the internet bandwidth problem!
This is a large reason why E-Rate dollars are being consumed for Prioirty 1 at an unsustainable rate…
Look at the details of your usage, if you can’t then that is your first step to solving your problems.
just my 2 cents 🙂
Great article. The implications of the math, though, are staggering! A minimum of 100 MB per second per 1,000 users? That means my medium sized district of 2,100 needs a 210 MB per second connection, almost ten times what we’re getting now! And Jefferson County Schools? With somewhere around 100,000 students, they need one hundred 100 MB per second connections. That’s a 10 GIGABYTE connection!
On the positive side, on the weekends, when very few people are in the district, the Internet connection would be smoking!