Calif. school district crashing the Internet

RIVERSIDE COUNTY, Calif. -- The Coachella Valley Unified School District has handed out so many iPads this year that the schools have begun draining Internet bandwidth from neighboring districts, causing slowdowns and crashes in schools throughout the desert.

Thousands of student tablets and a widespread malware infection have caused Internet consumption in the district to skyrocket to nearly three times as much as Palm Springs Unified or Desert Sands Unified districts, according to the Riverside County Office of Education.

The surge has overtaxed the Internet supply that all three districts share, causing connection problems at schools from Desert Hot Springs to the Salton Sea.

Richard D'Souza, executive director of information technology services for the county education office, said Monday that Coachella Valley Unified officials ignored requests to limit their consumption.

Eventually, after months of issues caused by over-consumption, the county office capped the connection, forcibly limiting how much bandwidth they can use. The cap took effect on Friday.

"They did not act like a good neighbor. I don't know how else to explain it," D'Souza said.

Desert Sands and Palm Springs district officials said they first noticed a slower Internet connection at the beginning of the school year, and the Internet problems grew worse after January. However, the impact was most potent in Palm Springs, whose connection is closely linked to the Coachella district. As consumption grew, Palm Springs Unified schools suffered an intermittent connection that would trickle for minutes or vanish for hours.

The connection problems were particularly frustrating for teachers like Jordy Tollefson, who teaches social studies at James Workman Middle School, a technology-heavy school in Cathedral City, Calif.

Tollefson's class received a set of Google Chromebooks just before winter break. Although the devices promised to transform how his class operates, the feeble Internet connection held them back.

For example, in mid-April, Tollefson launched a lesson about the Renaissance specifically designed for the new Chromebooks. The devices would let students watch short videos on topics such as the printing press, then answer questions about the clip. And because each student has a Chromebook, he or she could progress at his or her own pace, watching the clip over and over if necessary.

That's how it was supposed to work, at least.

"You can imagine what happened with 30 students who were all supposed to be streaming a video," Tollefson said. "They weren't learning. They were buffering. What could have been an awesome experience turned into a lot of frustrated students."

The Internet connection in Palm Springs Unified finally rebounded this week after the cap. But Darryl Adams, superintendent of Coachella Valley Unified, said Wednesday the Internet cap had led to slower downloads, delayed email and limited use of the iPads' online functions.

Adams confirmed Wednesday he was aware of previous Internet issues at the other school districts, and said that Coachella Valley Unified had "sought to work with the county to mitigate the affect on our neighbors."

iPads for all, Internet for some

Coachella Valley Unified enacted an ambitious "mobile learning initiative" this school year, issuing a bond-funded iPad to every student — preschool to high school — in the district. The district has more than 18,000 students. About 5,000 students were given iPads last school year as a pilot program.

The district proudly announced it had completed its iPad rollout during a school board meeting on May 8.

Although the iPad initiative has brought technology to thousands of students who could not otherwise afford it, it has also significantly increased the school district's need for bandwidth. Distributing Internet to schools is not unlike piping water to homes — like a water pipe, an Internet connection has limits on capacity, and can flow weakly if demand outpaces supply.

The three desert districts have shared this Internet connection since it was installed in 2003. The county connection has a bandwidth of one gigabit per second, or 1,000 megabits per second, which is enough Internet capacity to support basic Internet usage at more than 300 homes.

However, since the start of the school year, Coachella Valley Unified's Internet consumption has grown from about 300 megabits per second to 850 megabits per second — or 85 percent of the connection's capacity — leaving only a sliver of Internet for the other two districts to share. Palm Springs Unified and Desert Sands Unified consume about 300 megabits per second each.

In late February, the Riverside County Office of Education upgraded its connection, doubling its capacity to two gigabits, in hopes of ending Internet woes. In March, the county office asked all districts to limit their usage to 600 megabits per second so there would be enough Internet to share.

"Everyone agreed to do so. Everyone except Coachella Valley Unified," D'Souza said.

D'Souza said the county education office plans to install a 10-gigabit connection by the end of the year. The connection should provide enough Internet capacity to support all three desert districts, iPads and all, for the foreseeable future.

Will Carr, director of educational technology and information systems in Palm Springs Unified, said he attempted to boost Internet speeds by tightening internal restrictions, limiting the Internet to educational functions only. But Internet access remained slow.

In January, Carr used an Internet-monitoring program to discover that Coachella Valley Unified was absorbing a majority of the bandwidth.

"It was a little bit of a moment of frustration," Carr said. "Basically, their utilization was so high on the shared pipe that it had started to take away the available bandwidth. Because they were oversubscribing to the pipe, we all suffered."

Carr said he raised the issue with the county office, which said it was working to address the problem. However, even after the county office doubled its bandwidth capacity, Internet service remained slow and undependable until the cap was placed last week.

"Now everything is working beautifully," Carr said. "We still have some of those websites blocked, but we are considering opening things back up again."