Jan
29
Written by:
Dan Maas
1/29/2009
First, I have to again note that I have not been a prolific blogger this year. I think this is because we are dealing with some really unpleasant issues at the ESC and they have taken lots of my thinking time... and such matters don't lend themselves well to blogging. On to my thoughts for this post...
Last summer, I posted a blog item about a wireless challenge I observed at another venue outside LPS. The experience made me really appreciate Mike Zehner and his network team for the high quality wifi services we enjoy and utilize in the district. My post was intended to send some kudos his way and to use the experience to highlight how challenging wireless really is. However, my message was not as well crafted as I hoped and I got a comment back from a member of the organization hosting the event noting that I seemed happy to comment on other people's failures and not explore our own. Since it was not my intent to bash anyone, I took the post down.
At this time, I will indeed report on my own failures here in LPS. Namely, I have completely overlooked the status of cable TV in the district.
During the Inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States, our network experienced unprecedented activity. Prior to last Tuesday, we had never seen more than a handful of spikes to 100 mbps capacity on our network and never for more than a few seconds (for those interested in the readership, a T-1 is 1.54 mbps, your Cable service at home might achieve 3 mbps tops... so we have a pretty big connection). At around 8:00 AM, we saw the traffic flatline at 100mbps and it stayed there for hours. The good news was the network did not crash and literally hundreds of simultaneous video streams came across the network. I sent out a quick survey (my second failure was in the mistakes I made in that survey... I left out a couple sites in the location list) to all LPS staff and had over 330 responses. This group reported having at least tried a video stream of the Inauguration and the majority of them were able to get at least a fair experience. I had defined "fair" as good audio with choppy video.
What was most disconcerting for me was the number folks reporting they could not get a good cable TV access. In discussing this with my team, it became clear that while we have connections for cable going to all schools, a few have been disabled from our own construction work and others have insufficient distribution networking. We are working on an assessment and I will bring this up with our school and district leadership.
But the lesson for me is clear. We have been so focused on the IP networking that I had lost sight of the cable tv network situation. At the very least, we need a fully functional cable TV outlet connected to a working TV in every school for a variety of reasons. Distribution all the way out to every classroom is an expensive proposition and in today's climate, it seems unrealistic to even propose such an investment. And considering the rarity of this kind of event, I think the return on investment might never be realized.
Fundamentally, I was pleased that our network functioned well and did not succumb to overload. I think the event also pointed out the importance of broadband and that while we may have better than most network capacity, we are not where we need to be. Our wide area network of fiber connections is certainly up to snuff. And a 100 mbps link to the Internet is not too shabby. But it is clear to me that we do need to add a secondary Internet link and that another 100 mbps will be needed in the foreseeable future as these kinds of events become standard Internet fare.
Live and learn...