Projecting La Porte ISD Bandwidth Needs

Prior to the 1996 bond election, La Porte ISD (my employer) had a leased 56 K (56 kilobits per second) connection between each campus and the central office. Teachers that could justify it their principals (5 or 6 throughout the district), had dial-up (24 K) connections to their personal Internet accounts in their labs. TENET (The Texas Education Network) began supplying free Internet accounts to teachers in 1992.

As LPISD began to install Local Area Networks in 1997, the district acquired a T-1 connection to the Internet (1,540 K) through Region IV Education Service Center that could be used by any computer in the district that was on the network. Individual dial-up accounts were no longer necessary. This is approximately the time when LPISD put up their first web and email servers.

Up until about the year 2000, this was all of the bandwidth La Porte ISD had for 7,000 students and approximately 600 teachers and administrative staff that use the Internet. If you have a "Roadrunner" cable or a DSL connection, you probably have this much bandwidth into your house today.

As most of the campus local area networks were installed, we upgraded our internet connection in 2000 to an OC3 fiber optic connection (155,000 K). We currently use 5 -7 K during a typical school day, and occasionally "burst" up to 30,000 K.

We pay for 3,000 K, burstable to 10,000 K per month.

Year	Kilobits per second (Kbps)
Prior to 1997	56
2000 - 2003	1,540
2000 - 2003	2 - 4,000 (up to 8,000)
2003 - 2006	5 - 7,000 (up to 30,000)