Nuts and Bolts:Bandwidth No Nos and OS Woes
As I’m sure you have noticed, we have some bandwidth issues. Currently, each of our school sites is equipped with a 10mb/sec connection. To put this in context ,the lowest speed offered by Comcast for home internet is 25mb/sec, 2.5 times the speed for one of our entire campus’ for a single household, and Google has equipped some houses with 1000mb/s connections- 100 times our speed for single homes. Additionally, one HD video on YouTube can use between 2.5mb/s and 5mb/s, that is a between a quarter and half of an entire school’s bandwidth. You might be thinking “Why is our speed so inadequate?” The reason is that school funding is highly rigid and technology trends are extremely dynamic. It is very difficult to foresee what the future will bring with real clarity, because new technologies come that blow up predictive models. For example, in 2007 YouTube, a company that uploaded its first video in 2005, used more bandwidth than the entirety of the internet in the year 2000. That being said, we do have a plan that should give us some bandwidth breathing room.
We are addressing our bandwidth issue in two ways and it can best be explained by thinking of a water distribution system. The first issue is the water main, i.e. SCOE’s bandwidth. Our main 10mb/sec pipes come from the county and currently the county does not have the capacity to expand our connection speed. They are in the process of adding bandwidth- we currently do not have a firm date, but have been told that it will hopefully be an early Christmas present. The other issue is our internal plumbing, both our wired and even more so our wireless network, cannot handle a huge increase in bandwidth from SCOE- our pipes are too small to deliver the increase we really need. To address this issue, we are planning network upgrades at all sites to vastly improve our internal plumbing and our ability to deliver further bandwidth increases from SCOE. The bottom line is that we should be seeing a nice increase by 2014. This will hopefully keep us from constantly scraping our bandwidth ceiling. Next year, with network upgrades, we should get some real breathing room.
XP Goes Out to Pasture
After 14 years, Microsoft will be ending support for Windows XP. This means that any security issues, including critical security patches, will no longer be pushed out. Due to the fact that all of our computers are networked, a single compromised machine can create huge problems on our network and compromise the security of all connected machines. This means that XP computers will need to be upgraded to Windows 7, or if they cannot take the upgrade will need to be decommissioned. We will be compiling a list of computers to be decommissioned and will start upgrading XP machines to Windows 7 so that we will be ready for the retirement of XP and maintain the integrity of our larger computer network.