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At my school, we get 100 gbit internet speeds. Where does the school get the internet from, the best internet speeds we have in the Bay Area are 100mbit(Comcast BuisnessClass). When I do a speedtest, the ISP shows Palo Alto Unified School District and during school hours speeds are 500mbit, and during lunch, I decided to go to the computer lab to try downloading a 1 gbyte file, and it finished in 16 seconds at about 60 mbyte/sec, with every other person watching youtube, or doing something that requires a lot of bandwith ... Where does my school get their internet from, and how did they start their own ISP, please note that the cables where not cat7, but just regular ethernet cables.

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/2980441705

Edited by kirill2485 because: title
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Short answer: the district almost certainly didn't "become an ISP" in the consumer sense — it bought high‑capacity transport and runs its own campus routing. As pointed out, businesses and large organizations pay for bigger circuits. What measured (~60 MB/s) is consistent with either a multi‑hundred‑megabit/1 Gbit+ backhaul or with downloads served from a nearby cache or the campus LAN, not a mystery physical cable type.

Why it looks so fast: schools commonly use carrier fiber (lit or leased dark fiber), metro/Ethernet circuits, or connect to regional research/education backbones. The campus core is typically 10G/40G/100G, with 1G or 10G links to labs. Content delivery networks (CDNs) and in‑network caching (Google/YouTube caches, Netflix appliances, local proxy caches) often deliver huge throughput because the traffic never traverses a congested upstream link. Ordinary Cat5e/Cat6 patch cables are fine for gigabit over short runs, so “regular ethernet cables” don’t imply a slow WAN.

How to verify what the school is using: look up the public IP block (WHOIS) shown by your speedtest, and run a traceroute to see the first public hop — that identifies the carrier or the district’s edge router. Example commands:

traceroute -n 8.8.8.8     # Linux/macOS
tracert -d 8.8.8.8        # Windows
whois <public-IP>

If the district advertises its own ASN/IP blocks (you’ll see that in WHOIS/traceroute), tests may show the district name as the "ISP" even though the transport is bought from carriers.

Starting a true ISP is a different scale: it requires IP allocations/ASN, peering/transit contracts, fiber access to buildings, colocation, and support/NOC operations. For most school districts it’s more cost‑effective to lease bandwidth and operate the campus network and routing on top of that service.

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Member Avatar for Member #114542

Businesses and large organizations like schools can pay more to get a connection with a lot of bandwidth. The school likely has an expensive fiber line in order to have enough bandwidth to serve a lot of students.

60 MB/s is about 500 Mbps. Usually, you'll see Internet speeds advertised in bits per second (bps).

I did a quick look at Comcast's business site, and they provide up to 10 Gbps connections. That's roughly 10,000 Mbps.

Member Avatar for kirill2485

Hello, yes I already knew a long time ago that there is 8 bits in a byte. I am looking at the Comcast Buisness site and the most I'm seeing is 100mbps down 20 up:

Where does it say that Comcast Buisness Class is 10gbps

Edited by kirill2485 because: up/down
Member Avatar for kirill2485

just looked at a different page and saw the 10gbps.

thanks

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