Monthly usage for a school?

[Asha'man X]

Hey everybody

If anyone here works in a school, high, primary or private, with a pupil and staff count of just under 400, could you give me an idea what your average monthly bandwidth usage is?

We now have a total of 8gigs a month for our school, this includes external mail. The staff are unfiltered, whereas students are filtered from a lot of inappropriate sites that chew cap.

We went up to 8 a month last year from 6, but now that our IT lab is used more and we have both more staff and students, I have a feeling we may need to go up to 10 a month soon. I should be able to convince the bursar of this need since hopefully adsl prices should be dropping during the course of this year.

Any input is appreciated thanks

Cheers

 

[The_Unbeliever]

What web filtering technology are you using? Websense, dansguardian etc...

You can also use said filtering technology to filter out banner ads and the such.

The use of a proxy to cache contents is highly recommended.

If you use antivirus, consider a package which can be centrally managed so that only one (the server) downloads the new virus definitions and push it out to the rest of the network.

Disable windowsupdates unless you can cache update contents locally on your network.

As a company we push 25 to 40 gigs a month (average) on our uncapped line every month.

 

[general_koffi]

I helped out in the IT department at my school when I was in matric there last year...

We pushed 30GB a month with a highschool of about 500 and a primary school of about 600.

Whatever other filtering you use... Make sure you block www.youtube.com, www.facebook.com and www.myspace.com at the source. You wouldn't believe how much bandwidth those three can chew up.

 

[Asha'man X]

Thanks for the replies guys.

Should have added that I am using Dansguardian to filter the students. The "big 3" of Youtube, FaceBook and Myspace is all blocked for the students, along with most webmail type of accounts and loads of other time and cap wasters. Staff are not blocked but have been verbally and politely requested not to abuse the system.

I have Squid as the proxy cache, which does quite a good job. I have disabled Windows updates and am currently using Autopatcher. When time and my knowledge permits, I will get WSUS up and running to handle the updates. We have Symantec Corporate AV version 9 which also has central updating of definitions.

Our school is a little private place that goes from Pre-Reception to Upper Form 6 (British based education), we are now straining at the seams of 320 pupils and about 50 staff. Since extra pupils means we will finally be running in the black financially, I might try and twist the arm of the new bursar to increase both cap and line speed. The 512k line is getting a little slow.

Thanks for the advice

Cheers

 

[gregmcc]

I have disabled Windows updates and am currently using Autopatche

You do realise autopatcher is no more - MS pulled the plug on them.

WSUS works very well!!! But you do need to run it on a 2000/2003 server which you will then need a license for.

Its amazing how little bandwith you will need if you do a good job with the content filtering software - block the bandwidth wasters. No avi/mp3/iso etc etc. And block the streaming sites as well.

 

[dyanamo]

Worked at a High School for 5 years with 1000 people, about 40 computer using staff and +- 70 Internet connected PC's. Used 12 gigs a month on a 4MB line. We used wingate and all I can say is the caching in it is amazing. It has everything you need for multiple computers connected to internet. Can create profiles etc so we set up a student profile for break(lunch time) and charged the students 50c a meg to use as they please (obviously no porn etc)

 

[HavocXphere]

My old school (900ppls) was cruising at about 7 gigs. They restricted the max file size that can be downloaded to 500k so that nobody leeches the schools line to death. Worked well. They also had a soft cap there so the school was never completely without internet access.

My advice would be to log everything very carefully and then nail those that abuse the internet access. That will deter others in future.

Also install adblockers (on the server, not each PC). That can also save a decent chunk.

And definitely have some sort of caching going and block all pages with the word torrent in it.