It's not 12th grade! (Bandwidth again....)

We are looking closely at where our 4 Mbps are going.
Since 12th grade are heavy laptop users, we did wonder what amount of our bandwidth would be freed up when they went off to do their IB exams.
Answer: none. In fact it is worse than before.
Two colleagues had to give up on their booked (and paid for) webinar yesterday since it was impossible to follow it.
Here is the usage chart - the first distribution being yesterday, Wednesday.

Conclusions? We need more bits per second!

Bandwidth - continued...

In January I wrote about predicting bandwidth (When is it ever enough - how many of these little megabits do we need? ). The State Education Technology Directors Association (SETDA) was predicting 10 Mbps per 1,000 students/staff, in a technologically rich environment, over the next 2 or 3 years.
Does this work pro-rata? That is, 1 Mbps per 100 students/staff?
Look at this graph of our one day average over the past year. You can see when we upgraded from a 2 Mbps connection to a 4 Mbps one. 

Now, as the bandwidth provided increased, we made full use of that bandwidth. When we look at our daily use, we see very many times in the school day when we get full use of the maximum bandwidth (and thus have a poor internet experience as things slow down). But, we have a 4 Mbps connection with a maximum of 350 users at one time. So, crudely, a 3.5 Mbps connection should suffice. Yet it does not.

A group that makes a great use of the bandwidth is our current 12th grade. We are going to monitor our bandwidth use over the next few days since they have finished classes - what impact will it have?

An interesting aside: disagreement over what will happen in the future - one view is that bandwidth capacity will continue to grow exponentially (HD coming in, etc) and the other that it will flatten out (better rendering, on-computer devices to reduce need for full transmision).

What do you think?

When is it ever enough - how many of these little megabits do we need?

Our 4 Mbps connection is saturated for much of the day. We had 2 Mbps last school year and doubled after that was saturated. But how much is enough? Should we ration and/or educate users that internet connection is like any other resource - you need to just open the tap enough to get the stream of water to drink from and remember to turn the tap off afterwards....
The State Education Technology Directors Association (SETDA) issued their recommendation (vision?) for the Class of 2020 Action Plan for Education with reference to broadband speed :

Key recommendations include:

In a technology-rich learning environment for the next 2-3 years, SETDA recommends:

• An external Internet connection to the Internet Service Provider of 10 Mbps per 1,000 students/staff
• Internal wide area network connections from the district to each school between schools of at least 100 Mbps per 1,000 students/staff

In a technology-rich learning environment for the next 5-7 years, SETDA recommends:

• An external Internet connection to the Internet Service Provider of 100 Mbps per 1,000 students/staff
• Internal wide area network connections from the district to each school between schools of at least 1 Gbps per 1,000 students/staff