Why Are Bandwidth Needs Increasing in K–12 Schools?
Bandwidth needs in K–12 schools are growing because the volume of the digital data driving education today and the number of devices in schools are increasing.
First, there’s digital learning. “The modern K–12 environment is composed mostly of online content,” says Sam Lovelace, technology director at Lakeland School Corp., a rural district in Indiana. “All the content that the teachers are providing and students are ingesting, that’s all online.”
“Making sure that there is ample bandwidth in classrooms for 30 students plus a teacher — and all of their devices — is very important,” he says.
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Then there’s device proliferation. “There are more and more devices coming into schools,” says Christian Gilby, senior director of product marketing at Juniper Networks.
Most schools have moved to one-to-one computing, but those aren’t the only devices vying for internet access. “Students are bringing devices in, whether it’s tablets or smartphones, and the Internet of Things has been a trend for quite some time,” Gilby says.
Districts need to be intentional as they assess their strategies to address this Wi-Fi squeeze.
Bandwidth Formulas and Wireless Site Surveys Help Schools Evaluate Need
To calculate bandwidth needs, IT leaders should start by looking at current performance in their Wi-Fi landscape to determine where or how to adjust.
“Are people having connectivity issues? Some of it comes anecdotally, where you get teachers raising tickets with IT staff,” Gilby says.
IT professionals can also work with their vendors to analyze the radio frequency environment and the physical characteristics of a building. Site survey tools will generate a usage heat map. “I can pull up the heat map and see if I have any coverage holes right now or if I’m over capacity in certain areas of the school.” Gilby explains. “It helps me figure out what to do when I start to look at an upgrade.”
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Lovelace has used site surveys to optimize bandwidth availability in his district’s schools. “We are able to use our site survey findings to go through and tune classrooms to make sure that the signal strength is where it should be,” he says.
When the district upgraded its networking equipment to Ubiquiti UniFi products, its surveys ensured the access points “were not providing too much bleed-through into the adjacent classrooms,” he says. This reduced interference and airtime issues as the district added APs.
Wi-Fi 7 and Next-Generation Access Points Support School Bandwidth Demands
Modernized solutions such as Wi-Fi 7 and next-generation APs help deliver the best connectivity for schools as bandwidth demands continue to grow.
The Wi-Fi 7 standard “introduced is the ability for a client — say, a laptop or a tablet — to transmit on two bands at the same time. Prior to that, I could only do one band at a time,” Gilby says. This gives devices more avenues for connectivity.
Wi-Fi 7 also delivers multi-user MIMO — multiple inputs, multiple outputs — upstream and downstream, he says. This helps to optimize efficiency by allowing a single AP to transmit data to multiple devices simultaneously.
