I attended a regional Technology advisory committee meeting this week, and mentioned near the end how important it is that we are advocating for increased bandwidth to rural West Texas and specifically to rural school districts.
To illustrate this critical need, consider the graph below, from a free bandwidth test I ran tonight at home connected via my cable modem:
Many of the rural school districts in our area still have a single T-1 line providing all the bandwidth for the entire district. I am not sure what the number of districts with just T-1 lines is, but I can find out. The point is that these districts have a single T-1, and half of that is used for videoconferencing in many cases. So effectively the entire district’s teachers and students share half a T-1.
A full T-1 is 1.54 Mbps (Megabits per second). My quick, free bandwidth test for my home Internet connection revealed that I am getting about 3 megabits per second. Twice as fast as a T-1. And four times as fast as those rural school districts who are sharing half a T-1.
So many of the promises as well as realities of technology provided content and connections in today’s educational environment hinge on bandwidth. For home users with broadband connections, things look pretty good today. But what about our schools?
On this day..
- Highlights from the 2011 Educational Technology Conference (ETC) in Missoula - 2011
- Technology Trends in Higher Education (Sept 2010) - 2010
- Understand Creative Commons in 180 seconds - 2010
- Delete iPad photos with Image Capture - 2010
- Comparing options for free audio recording directly to the web: iPadio and Voisse - 2010
- Merge PDF files (for free) with PDFsam - 2010
- Interactive technology access does not guarantee good teaching and learning - 2009
- Individualized Assessment on an iPod Touch Using Google Docs - via gWhiz MLA - 2009
- K-12 Online Conference Teasers: Here Comes Digital Learning! - 2008
- So what is NOT K-12 Online going to be in 2008? - 2008
