Migration to gigabit

Today, every computer is equipped with a gigabit port. Why can’t we take advantage of it?   Most district networks have been completely developed on a 100mbps access. The cost of gigabit has been far too expensive for many schools. We as a district are starting to have the need to move more and more devices on to gigabit.

10 Gigabit Backbone

Ten Gigabit uplinks brings three major challenges.

• Cost of hardware
• Current Fiberoptic Backbone
• Does this make sense in a K12 environment today?

Let start off with the simple question do we really need 10GBPS to access switch? Well the simple answer is no not really. I could not see many school districts utilizing a full 10GBPS to each IDF. Lets take in perspective what 10GBPS really looks like in the form of data.

• 2000+ Netflix HD Streams 3.8mbps (.00038GPBS)
• 1000 10MPBS
• 100 100MBPS connections
• 10 1GPBS connections

This starts to beg the question what on earth are we going to with that much data in one IDF cabinet.

Logically