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Internet Bandwidth

 Greetings Prairie Hawks! 


As we've shared over the last 2 weeks, we're reaching our internet bandwidth cap that our firewall will allow us through during portions of days. He's a picture of our usage from the last week (notice the high usage on Wednesday, yesterday)


Yesterday, as you can see in the graph, the bandwidth was very high compared to previous days. We received reports that elementary teachers could not access the required FAST system for required progress monitoring.

We've tried a variety of mitigation strategies by blocking cell phones from connecting to our wireless network (Xirrus) in certain high use buildings, to blocking certain websites through our content web filter (iBoss) such as streaming media (Netflix, Disney Plus, etc). 

We do have a few requests at this time. Please limit the consumption of streaming video (YouTube). If you're showing a video for student learning, show it one time on your projector screen instead of having each student stream their own videos. 

If you are a user of GoGuardian, you'll know that we turned it off for a short period of time to examine its impact on the network. If you continue to use GoGuardian, please use it to limit student usage. We are seeing portions of the network strained hard when students are in studyhalls, or during unstructured times. 

Our current firewall is like a garden hose connected to a fire hydrant (Thanks Sam Ketchum for this analogy!). We are working with the vendor of our new firewall that was just recently purchased and pushing them to have full installation as soon as possible. This will make our connection larger to the Internet and allow for more traffic to move through. Until we get this implemented we ask that each user watch what they are doing (Think similar to saving the environment, if each person does a little it all adds up!)

We'll continue to monitor and will provide updates every few days. Thanks for your patience! 


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