Innovative Bandwith Arrangements - Appendix 4: A Scoping of School Bandwidth Needs

SchoolNet, an arm of Industry Canada, undertook a survey in late 1999 to probe the level of Internet connectivity in Canadian K-12 public schools.  The survey findings identified the number of Internet capable and connected computers, the location of those connected computers and the access methods schools use to connect to the Internet.  On the latter count, the following is a verbatim extract (SchoolNet, 2000):

"SchoolNet’s online survey probed the different types of access methods used by schools to connect to the Internet.  As alluded to earlier, it is this section of the survey that school boards had the most difficulty in providing accurate responses partly because of the complexity of our questions.  However, the results enabled SchoolNet to identify three methods of connecting to the Internet.  The most prevalent method of access is via a dedicated access line with speeds ranging from 64 kb/s, 128 kb/s or 1 Mb/s or faster.  These lines are usually connected to the school board’s Wide Area Network, WAN, or directly to the provincial network.  The second most popular method of accessing the Internet is via a dial-up modem with speeds ranging between 28-56 kb/s.  The third method is via a DirecPC[1] with an average available access speed per school of 10 kb/s.  Graph 3 shows the percentage of schools using each of these three methods".

The survey results only provide a general indication of the types of connection used by schools.  More research is required to determine with more accuracy their capability to deliver adequate bandwidth and speed to support instructional and administrative needs of individual schools.  The Connectivity Working Group Report of 1999, for example, states that a minimum of 128 kb/s per desktop [emphasis added] is required to support multimedia and distance learning applications.  While the survey points to most schools being connected to their school board or district via a ‘dedicated’ line, there is considerable evidence that existing network facilities are still far from being able to deliver that level of bandwidth to each connected computer in the schools. 

The focus of this national survey was on a variety of connectivity and access-related parameters.  Only a limited picture was gained as to the extent of bandwidth availability and the question of whether students are being provided with adequate bandwidth was not directly addressed.

In its submission to Canada’s National Broadband Task Force, CANARIE Inc. stated that the Internet bandwidth requirement of an organization is a statistical aggregation of the demands of its staff and its clients, and is a function of the applications being used.  For example, Web browsing requires intermittent (i.e. burst) access to data while video conferencing has more steady bandwidth needs.  They proposed the following estimate of the bandwidth needs of schools (CANARIE, 2001):

Table 17: Bandwidth Needs of Organisations

The National Center for Education Statistics has been collecting data on Internet access in US public schools since 1994.  The latest report for the year 2000 provides trend analysis on the progress of public schools and classrooms in connecting to the Internet, the ratio of students to instructional computers and to instructional computers with Internet access, and the types of Internet connections used.  It also provides, for the year 2000, information on student access to the Internet outside of regular school hours and on schools’ acceptable-use policies.  The closest it gets to assessing bandwidth-related matters is given by the following extract (NCES, 2001):

How are public schools connected to the Internet? 

Over the years, changes have occurred in the type of network connections used by public schools and the speed at which they are connected to the Internet.  In 1996, dial-up Internet connections were used by almost three-fourths (74 per cent) of public schools having Internet access.  By 2000, schools tended to use faster dedicated-line Internet connections, such as 56Kb, T1/DS1, fractionalised T1, T3/DS3, and fractionalised T3 lines.  Seventy-seven percent of the nation’s public schools that were connected to the Internet used dedicated lines, 11 per cent used dial-up (not continuous) connections, and 24 per cent of schools used other (continuous) connection types, including ISDN, wireless connections, and cable modems.  There were differences by instructional level; secondary schools (86 per cent) were more likely to use dedicated lines than elementary schools (74 per cent). 

(Note: The above percentages add to more than 100 because schools may use more than one type of connection.)

In a commentary on the above NCES report, the following quotation is noteworthy (Stellin, 2001):

As more teachers embrace the Internet …a strain is placed on the district’s technology infrastructure.  In particular, the use of video as part of the learning process is increasing within the district – such as interactive video sessions between high school students and experts from a local college to discuss different career paths.  Another application that requires a lot of bandwidth … is a Web-based curriculum design assistant, which is a tool that allows teachers to share lesson plans.
(Bob Nelson, director of technology for Milwaukee public schools.)

Another US perspective is provided by the bipartisan, congressional Web-based Education Commission that set out to discover how the Internet is being used to enhance learning opportunity for all learners from pre-kindergarten through high school, at post secondary colleges and universities, and in corporate training. (Kerry, 2000)

In one of its seven ‘calls to action’, the Commission recommended:

• Make powerful new Internet resources, especially broadband access, widely and equitably available and affordable for all learners:

• The promise of high quality web-based education is made possible by technological and communications trends that could lead to important educational applications over the next two to three years;  
• These include greater bandwidth, expansion of broadband and wireless computing, opportunities provided by digital convergence, and lower costs of connectivity.

The Commission highlighted that “for education, broadband access[3] means the elimination of time and distance from the learning equation”.  In suggesting that US states and school districts with existing networks could interconnect with the Internet2 advanced networking platform, it further noted that “for learners this will mean a richer delivery of content than today’s delivery of simple text”.  Examples of “richer” interactive environments included access to:

• HDTV-quality video and CD-quality audio on-demand that will enable students to search interactively;
• Collaborative opportunities where teachers and students separated by hundreds of miles can interact with each other as if they were sitting across the table; and
• Remote classroom resources such as mountain-top telescopes and electron microscopes.

Although schools are administered at the municipal level, the federal Ministry for Education has funded certain ICT developments on a national basis over the last five years or so.  An early policy statement to fund bandwidth for Internet service to schools is extracted here verbatim, but since then demand levels would have risen significantly: (Regeringskansliet, 1997)

Nature of the grant

The state will not take over from the governing bodies the cost of school’s Internet connections.  Instead, the intention is for state funds to be provided for a limited period to hasten a transition to connections of higher capacity.  The grant should be calculated for each school separately, and the level should vary with size, in terms of the number of pupils.

The calculation sets a limit to how much a school’s governing body can receive.  Each governing body can add connections where they are most useful.  In many schools the addition will consist of a high-speed connection, while others will be hooked up to a municipal network.  Schools that already have a connection can choose to increase their capacity or install a LAN that reaches into the teaching premises (classrooms).  Initially, the aim is for each school to have at least one connection, as follows:

Size of school              Capacity

< 200 pupils                   128 kb/s

200-500 pupils               512 kb/s

> 500 pupils                   2 Mb/s  

As we saw in section 3.1.3, the reality in Stockholm by the year 2001 was quite different where a potential 100 Mb/s capacity was then available to each student computer within the public schools.

Over recent years, emphasis has been placed more on monitoring the extent of access to computers by teachers and by students in the classroom.  Where target figures for bandwidth to schools have been made public, they tend to be set at ‘lowest common denominator’ levels made necessary by universal accessibility policies and affordability.  Any higher bandwidth amounts can be gained if the individual institution is willing to pay the necessary tariff to a carrier.  Targets as low as 64 kb/s or sometimes 128 kb/s are currently the norm.

Nevertheless there is increasing recognition that a bandwidth connection into schools of 256 kb/s, moving to 2 Mb/s within three years, is now considered a minimum, if schools are to take advantage of increasingly ‘bandwidth-hungry’ education applications.  However, no published basis has been found for any of these figures.

Over recent years, emphasis has been placed more on monitoring the extent of access to computers by teachers and by students in the classroom.  Where target figures for bandwidth to schools have been made public, they tend to be set at ‘lowest common denominator’ levels made necessary by universal accessibility policies and affordability.  Any higher bandwidth amounts can be gained if the individual institution is willing to pay the necessary tariff to a carrier.  Targets as low as 64 kb/s or sometimes 128 kb/s are currently the norm.

Nevertheless there is increasing recognition that a bandwidth connection into schools of 256 kb/s, moving to 2 Mb/s within three years, is now considered a minimum, if schools are to take advantage of increasingly ‘bandwidth-hungry’ education applications.  However, no published basis has been found for any of these figures.

Based solely on the need to provide bandwidth to enable students to browse Web pages via the Internet, it is possible to construct a plausible basis for setting an objective to plan network bandwidth to serve individual schools.  The scenario goes like this:[4]

• Assume an average size of a Web page is 15 kbytes and that each byte translates to 10 bits in a transmission, therefore such a Web page becomes 150 kbits long;
• An acceptable download time for a Web page is 5 seconds,[5] resulting in a required bandwidth of 30 kb/s per PC;
• The average student to PC ratio is 4:1, which then produces a bandwidth requirement of 7.5 kb/s per student;

• Fifty per cent of secondary school computers will be online at any one time (with primary school students utilizing the Internet one-third less) and 50 per cent of those computers will hit a caching server within the school.

The resultant planning figures are 1.25 kb/s of bandwidth per student for a primary school and 1.875 kb/s of bandwidth per student for a secondary school.  Naturally, different educational and training settings may call for other assumptions and so produce different answers to the above.  However, there needs to be a rational debate on the issue if the required resources are to be provided for our students to benefit from Internet-based technology.  Table 18 presents the conclusions based on typical school sizes for the state of Victoria.

Table 18: Planning Estimates for School Internet Bandwidth – without Video

Importantly, two factors have been omitted from these calculations:

• The impact of teacher and administrative computer use;
• Access to video content, either of a ‘streaming’ or ‘real-time’ nature.

As an indication of the impact of an additional video requirement for each student PC, quality desktop video-conferencing requires 256 to 512 kb/s whilst VHS-quality digital video (typically of MPEG1 standard) requires bandwidths of 1 to 3 Mb/s.  Even on a conservative reckoning, if video is included in the above calculations, the typical school bandwidth requirement would rise to a figure between 10 and 100 Mb/s.