Technology Update: Limited Bandwidth Update (3/28/16)

Welcome back! I hope that each of you had a restful and enjoyable Spring Break this past week and have recharged to finish out the school year strong! Over the break, the Technology department worked with WAVE to upgrade the data circuit between the district office and the Yolo County Office of Education (YCOE). The data circuit makes it possible to accept Internet bandwidth of up to 1 Gb from the YCOE. In addition we have installed equipment at the District Office in order to receive the Internet pipeline. Unfortunately, last Thursday we received an email from the YCOE stating that the YCOE’s vendor had missed a November 2015 installation date of their 10 Gb circuit; the new completion date is May 2016. Unfortunately, with all of the work performed to ensure we have the substantial bandwidth for testing, we will not be able to receive 1 Gb of data from YCOE – they simply do not have it.

What this means for you
As a result of this new obstacle, we are putting internal measures in place that will ensure that our students have the testing environment they need for success. This means that we will be implementing the following measures beginning on Tuesday, March 29, at 5 pm:

• All video and audio streaming traffic will be blocked for students, including YouTube.
• All video and audio streaming traffic will be blocked for teachers and staff, with the exception of YouTube. Pandora, Spotify, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, and all other streaming traffic will be blocked.
• Google traffic will be reduced from 70 Mb to 50 Mb.

Although the last thing we want to do is to block access, we decided that these are not critical service and felt it necessary to block them in order to accommodate our testing needs. These services take up a considerable amount of our bandwidth today and, by restricting these services, we should see better performance for students who are testing starting this week. We’ll continue to monitor performance and make adjustments as necessary.

Thank you for your patience as we work together to make the best online testing environment possible for our students.

As always, please let me know if you have specific questions or concerns,

Kim