Very disappointed to hear that BT may not meet the committed dates for the East Lothian schools WAN upgrade given here, and may even be asking for more money despite the whole project having been subject to competitive tender.
This would be extremely disappointing if true. I had a number of attempts at using the internet in Science and Maths classes over the last year or so, and ended up concluding that it simply wasn’t viable.
We have large secondary schools with less WAN bandwidth than many people now have to their home PC. Not only that, this bandwidth is shared with internal applications like web-based email. Email, of course, is so slow that many people don’t have time to use it. Most emails I get from teachers come from their home email addresses, and are sent in the evenings.
The bottom line is that if it’s impossible to get the WAN motorway in on time, we need to build a temporary bypass to get those packets flowing faster before we get gridlocked.
Even a single domestic ADSL link, running at up to 8Mbps, could be used. Maybe BT could bundle a couple of these, and we could connect schools using VPNs over the internet instead? Ideas, please!
Yes please do something. The school email is now grinding to a complete halt (40 minutes just to get the emails appearing). I don’t use it at all at school. The only way to get messages reliably to people is to go and find them or send a note with a pupil.
Thanks Jenni, I’ll see what I can do.
Hmmm – the post on Ollie’s blog seems to have disappeared. Did Ollie say something he shouldn’t have?
I was In Preston Lodge High School last Wednesday, and can confirm that it does not have functioning Internet access. According to staff, this has been the case for weeks, if not months. All our plans for sharing good practice and blogging with pupils are on hold at PL until they can get Internet access up to a reasonable speed. This is a terrible shame.