Static in the Ether

I spend part of my time providing network management and consulting services to a consortium of local schools – The Albany Schools Network (ASN). We have spent a significant amount of time over the last three years migrating form an ancient legacy system consisting of a decrepit SparcStation 5, and some ancient old Cisco Routers (AGS+ and CGS+ – both of which were eol’d in 1997) linked to nominally 33.6Kbit dedicated analog lines.

Thankfully we have come a long way and now boast a healthy modern network with peering at GINX. Early last year saw the introduction of the first of our 1Mbit DSL lines form Internet Solutions, the first real boost of bandwidth available to the schools, and something worthwhile doing since the actual links to the schools had been upgraded.

Looking over some stats I pulled up the following two reports from LightSquid while not the most scientific they convey the massive growth in utilization for the schools. While these represent the larges of the schools in terms of usage, the grown is pretty similar for all members of the consortium.

The first image is from may last year:

The second was generated this morning showing a somewhat heavier utilization. It is worth noting that during this period, the schools link was upgraded from 384Kbit to over a Megabit.

I find it extremely gratifying to see these schools making such full use of the resources at hand!