Sue Parler says:
May 2, 2011 at 11:03 pm
Hi all.
As one of the folks that manage blocking and unblocking sites (along with the appliance content database), I just thought I’d throw in my two cents here – and I understand that our situation may be unique. We block sites not only for content, but also because of high bandwidth usage. For example, I block mlb.com, nfl.com, nhl.com, etc. Since we are a 1:1 computer school, we have a potential of 900 simultaneous users. Now the stats say that at peak time, it never goes past 400, but even so – that’s a ton of bandwidth consumption. So imagine me, trying to get my class of 25 out to do some sort of webquest while 100 users are watching last night’s game highlights or the latest viral youtube video.
When unitedstreaming.com wanted us to entertain the thought of acquiring their services, even they admitted that seven simultaneous streams would choke a T1 to the point that no one could get out. Since Discovery has taken over, they offer different download options for schools with bandwidth issues, but with the number of users we have, we still have everything blocked to accommodate the majority.
I’ve taught our staff about browser plug-ins like Download Helper and sites like KeepVid, and it all works. Could it be better? Sure. But it also could be worse – much worse.
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Rowdy Granado says:
May 2, 2011 at 11:17 pm
Sue-
Great point. I think that is such a vital thing for teachers to try and understand, how the bandwidth works and if everyone is using it, it can crash it all.
I sometimes have to post videos onto our share drives for the teachers to distribute to their classes. I always remind them to pull it down off of the share drive and save it locally on their drive because the potential of crashing our server if they all played the videos at the same time.
Glad there was someone here that deals with it on the backside.
Thanks.
Rowdy
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