Article by Donna Davis
In most independent schools, and schools with a boarding program in particular, satisfying ever-increasing demand for bandwidth can feel like trying to control a dragon whose fiery breath destroys everything in its path. That’s how Joseph Lorenzatti sees the challenges involving Internet bandwidth at his boarding school.
Lorenzatti is technology director at The Williston Northampton School, a 7th-grade through one-year post-graduate school in Easthampton, Massachusetts. Of 500 students total, about half are boarders. In 2013, the school took steps to manage increasingly frequent online traffic jams, especially during peak times in the evenings when students tend to be accessing homework assignments, streaming videos, playing games and video-calling. Add staff, faculty and family members doing the same in their residences, and demand for bandwidth as well as potential for slowdowns and glitches increase.
To help fend off the bandwidth dragon, Williston Northampton took several steps. First, it worked with its existing Internet provider to increase bandwidth to 200 megabits-per-second (Mbps) “at a reasonable cost,” Lorenzatti says. At the time, this amount was “ahead of the curve, but now 200 Mbps is the norm, plus or minus 50 Mbps.”
The school also installed hardware that gives all users a fair chance to get in line to get online. Called NetEqualizer (netequalizer.com), the hardware is among other options that do not block bandwidth-hungry sites like Skype or Netflix. Instead, it acts like a traffic controller by determining which users are using excessive amounts of bandwidth. “It will say this person is hogging the Internet, so we are going to tell them to slow down a bit—hold on a second and we will let someone else through and then you can go through,” Lorenzatti says.
Other IT directors, business officers and heads of school share similar concerns about bandwidth demand. In the 2014 NBOA/SchoolDude IT Leadership Survey, 25 percent of schools responding said they had plans in place to increase bandwidth. Bandwidth also made the survey’s list of top five IT issues, challenges and priorities facing independent schools. Twelve percent of respondents cited it as “very challenging,” and 24 percent called it “challenging.”
Managing bandwidth effectively comes down to each school identifying an efficient financial and usage model that supports academic goals while providing an optimum experience to faculty, staff and students.
Everyone Gets in Line
Determining an appropriate amount of bandwidth for a school depends on several factors, especially the number of devices involved and how they are used. Some IT consultants recommend that schools calculate need by bandwidth per user, based on those factors. That approach, however, has drawbacks, says Alex Podchaski, director of technology for Oak Knoll School of the Holy Child in Summit, New Jersey, and a former IT administrator at Rutgers University. “It’s not a simple math problem,” he says. “You can’t say I have 700 devices and I am giving them x amount of bandwidth at all times and I’ll never have a problem.” (See More on NBOA.org for a link to Podchaski's presentation at the 2016 NBOA Annual Meeting.)
"You have to come down to what is reasonable—bandwidth shaping, device management or some combination of both."
Alex Podchaski
Oak Knoll School of the Holy Child
Cable companies, for example, can provide consumers with as much as 150 Mbps for a home usage plan that will download movies in seconds, upload large files and allow users to run six to eight devices at once. For the average school, that kind of service isn’t possible or affordable; instead, everyone must share the amount of bandwidth the school considers optimal. “If you assume every faculty apartment will have 150 Mbps, you are quickly going to price yourself out of the market because you cannot sustain that across the institution,” Podchaski says. “You have to come down to what is reasonable—bandwidth shaping, device management or some combination of both.”
Who’s Using Our Bandwidth?
For the most part, boarding schools have already made part of the decision by determining how much bandwidth they need to run their classroom applications and other web-based programs smoothly during the academic day. The challenge begins after classroom hours for many schools, when students return to their dorms and study halls, and staff and faculty go home to their residences. “You want the people still on campus to still have access to all of your internal services—for example, your learning management system—but you want to minimize the Xboxes, Netflix and those pieces,” Podchaski says.
Complicating the picture are faculty and other staff families. “If you are looking at a family with two adults and two kids, you are going to have a minimum of four computers, four cell phones, one to two tablets and one gaming system,” Podchaski estimates. He says schools need to determine what level of service they can realistically provide to those families.
Finally, it’s not just the students and staff who are looking for access—and it’s not just in classrooms, dorms and residences. Guests, too, are increasingly asking to have online access when they are on campus, and they—and everyone else—also want that access to extend to places like athletic fields and performance venues.
Getting Control
Any school’s ability to control bandwidth usage depends in part on its policies. Like most schools, Oregon Episcopal School (OES) recognizes that it cannot block all sites that might contain inappropriate or security-threatening content. The preK–12 day and boarding school for 850 students in Portland limits or prevents access to certain file-sharing and online gaming software programs because they can compromise the school network’s reliability and stability, according to Brad Baugher, director of educational technology.
In addition, the school segments user populations into separate networks for faculty/staff, students and guests. “Once they are on that network, they are always on that network,” says Baugher. On any given day, the school supports a total of 1,000 users with about 1,200 devices. The network divisions allow OES to determine what resources each group uses and modify the network to give users the best experience possible, consulting with department and division heads about usage and needs, Baugher says. The school also makes use of periodic technology audits to assess performance as well as security and then plans and budgets for ongoing growth. (OES technology policies: oes.edu/page.cfm?p=836)
Although OES uses an outside firm for its formal technology audits, the school’s technology department relies on a network of independent school IT colleagues to track trends and solutions involving issues like bandwidth demand. “It comes in handy when you don’t necessarily want to jump to hiring a business provider,” Baugher says. He consults with a Portland-area network as well as the national Association of Technology Leaders in Independent Schools (ATLIS).
Usage analysis can also help with managing bandwidth demand. “How is your bandwidth being utilized?” says Lorenzatti. Then, “what part of that is going out to the Internet? If you are unaware of what kind of traffic you have going out to the Internet, it will be difficult to say ‘if we get more bandwidth this is going to solve our issue,’” he says. “Once you have those two pieces, you can then say ‘here is a better way of organizing my traffic before increasing bandwidth.’”
Some approaches might include limiting access to applications and streaming and scheduling usage. Lorenzatti also suggests finding software or appliance-based solutions that make getting connected “more fair,” such as the NetEqualizer hardware that was installed at Williston Northampton.
