Member Avatar for opjjuly

Hello, i was recently employed in a school as an IT technician, i was called up to make suggestions on how they can upgrade their internet speed, since its very slow. iv realized that they are using 54 mbps wireless routers, as for the broadband i dnt have much info on that, will have to confirm with the ISP. The employee who was vacating the post never really walked me through about the network around school, so yeah im kind of clueless. Any ideas or suggestions you can provide, so that i present them to the management? the school is willing to spend, just to get the internet to be fast so jot down what type of routers i need to get etc.

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Quick, practical guidance for that builds on and without repeating what they already said: start with measurement, then fix internal bottlenecks, then change the uplink if needed. Controls (filtering, rate limits) and caching are important, but only after you know what the traffic looks like and how wireless capacity is being used.

  1. Audit and measure (first 7 days): inventory gateway, modem, switch uplinks, AP models and wiring; log concurrent connections and WAN utilization during class peaks. Enable SNMP/NetFlow or use simple polling tools to find the top talkers and busiest ports. Look at CPU/NAT session counts on the current router (consumer boxes choke on many sessions).
  2. Wireless check: the "54 Mbps" note indicates legacy gear. Do a site/capacity survey (walk the school during lessons), map dead zones, and count devices per classroom. Capacity is driven by clients per AP more than headline Mbps.
  3. Short fixes you can present to management: replace consumer routers with a business gateway (hardware NAT + QoS), deploy dual-band enterprise APs (spread more APs with lower power for capacity and use 5 GHz for heavy clients), separate student/staff VLANs/SSIDs, enable band-steering/airtime fairness. Implement a caching proxy (as @CimmerianX suggested) and a firewall with URL filtering and traffic shaping (as @JorgeM suggested) to limit non-educational streaming during class hours.
  4. Pilot then scale: do a one-week pilot (one building or floor) showing before/after graphs (utilization, latency, perceived speed). Only after internal fixes and policies are in place should you present an ISP upgrade — take measured peak concurrency and growth projections to the provider.

Troubleshooting tips: check for overloaded switch uplinks, poor channel planning on 2.4 GHz, and overloaded NAT on cheap routers. Deliver management a short report: current baseline, quick fixes applied, pilot results, and a recommended ISP change only if those steps don’t meet the school’s needs.

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Member Avatar for JorgeM

Simply upgrading the internet pipe may not be the best solution. For example, if you have students downloading a lot of content (movies, music, etc...), then a bigger pipe is just going to allow them to download more data.

Your first step is to try to deterimine what kind of traffic is traversing the network. You may consider in this "internet" upgrade to include some controls such as a URL filtering firewall or proxy server so that you can limit the target URLs and prevent students from accessing sites that are not eduction related.

You may also want to consider solutions that can rate limit. For example, a firewall and/or proxy solution that can place limits on certain traffic. For example, you may want to limit the amount of bandwidth for target sites like facebook or youtube, but allow unlimited access to approved sites.

Other solutions can limit data at certain times of the day.

Again, I think you need to consider integrating controls, not just adding more bandwidth.

Member Avatar for CimmerianX

I agree with JorgeM. You need to ID the traffic 1st to find a solution.

Rate limiting certain high volume sites is a good idea. You don't want 50 people all streaming hulu at the same time.

Also, installation and use of a caching proxy might be something to consider. All traffic must flow through the proxy which allows common images and static content to be caches and delivered ffrom the proxy, not the internet site. You can also implement web block features at the proxy. Want to block facebook, block it at the proxy.

Squid is a great, free one that can be setup quickly. more advanced features may take you some time to tweak.

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