Slow internet connections at School District 43 schools could be a thing of the past by next spring after the board of education on Tuesday agreed to spend $800,000 to connect with the city of Coquitlam's fibre optic network.
District staff and representatives of QNet, Coquitlam's fibre optic leasing company, were expected to meet yesterday to hammer out a plan for installing fibre at eight high schools, the board office and Winslow Centre, which houses international education and the staff development department.
The work will take several months and several challenges remain, including fine-tuning project costs for eight schools instead of the 70 that were originally proposed and deciding whether to proceed with the link to Port Moody secondary school prior to construction of the Evergreen Line.
The plan had been to lay down the fibre at the same time that utilities were being moved to make way for the rapid transit line but SD43's manager of internet services says that may change now that the $1.4-billion project has been delayed.
And while the school district can't afford to link up all the schools in the project's first phase, Brian Kuhn predicts all schools will benefit from new network monitoring tools that will be introduced over the next several months that "will improve performance quite significantly at every school."
The new monitoring tools will be able to identify and block inappropriate material, including pornographic websites, prioritize what's on the network and cache material locally so every school doesn't have to download the same video as well as compress the traffic so bandwidth isn't wasted. "All of those together save a lot of bandwidth by not wasting it," Kuhn explained. "We're going from a completely open and free for all network to a network where it's optimized."
The news that the first phase of the project was going ahead was greeted with enthusiasm by Rick Adams, general manager of QNet and Coquitlam's manager of internet services. While the deal with SD43 won't be a big money maker for the city-owned business because installation will be done at cost with some project management fees and lease rates will be 50% of what the city charges corporate users, Adams said partnering with the district to provide efficient technology services to schools has always been a key goal. "Helping to provide e-learning and the latest technology for kids in the Tri-Cities, obviously that's a goal we all share in the community," he said.
(Adams also said QNet's deals with Rogers for cell phone connections will be among the biggest for the company to date, exceeding $100,000 annually by 2012.)
The technology plan means SD43 can back off a bit on its digital diet and Kuhn said a freeze on technology purchases has been lifted and teachers and students will now be allowed to use their personal devices. Still, a digital code of conduct coming in the fall will put more stringent rules on what the school internet can be used for.
