Network

Bandwidth Increase Coming!
by Will McCullen

Good news everyone.  As of the last Tech Talk we have chosen a vendor for increasing our bandwidth between sites.  As most of you have experienced, the speed and capacity of our current Wide Area Network (WAN) leaves much to be desired.  The WAN represents the connections that provide communication between sites both phone and data.  For the data this would include Internet access, e-mail, District SASI, and a slew of other services.  We use it everyday and it can be really frustrating when it is slowed down by heavy traffic.  If you want to take a look at how your site has been doing go to http://traffic.amphi.com.  If you click on any of the graphs it will display even more information. 

The slowness has been a problem for sometime now.  Our demands for data have been increasing steadily.  For the Internet traffic, it has grown well past the simple web pages that were characteristic of the late nineties.  Most sites now include streaming media or audio.  Flash programs are flourishing more and more.  The Internet is getting animated, interactive and media friendly.  Our services are changing as well.  We are starting to implement services that require all the sites to communicate with central servers here at the District office.  Different employees find themselves at multiple sites needing to connect with either central databases or their individual files located on servers across the District.  All of this leads to an ever increasing need for more bandwidth.

For many years the WAN was based on what was called T1 services through Qwest.  As with many services provided by outside entities, whenever you want a service it is usually required that you sign a contract that commits you to that vendor for a specific amount of time.  Well, Amphitheater's contracts came open once again and we were able to negotiate a new deal.  After an evaluation of multiple vendors we have chosen to accept the bid from a company called Conterra.  The new WAN will be site to site wireless links that will dramatically increase our bandwidth.  Elementary sites will increase from 760 kilo (or thousand) bits per second (kbps) (think sub-lite speed) to 20 Mega (or million) bits per second (Mbps) (think warp drive).  Larger sites like middle schools and high schools that were on 1.5 Mbps connections will now go to 100 Mbps lines.  This should be a very noticeable improvement.  Services that required WAN communication should be snappier and more consistent.  Along with increased communication in the District, we will also be doubling our bandwidth to the Internet from the current 10 Mbps to 20 Mbps at the District office.