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The Luxury of a Bottomless Bucket of Bandwidth For Georgia Schools
Lemeowski writes: The IT departments at all the University System of Georgia institutions have a luxury that most CIOs could only dream of — access to about 2,800 miles of free fiber and a private cloud that they an always count on. The private cloud configuration allows the perk of not focusing on bandwith. "Our local CIOs even take some pleasure in telling telecom company representatives, 'If you can beat free, then I'm willing to listen.' That tends to shut down most conversations,"writes USG CIO Curt Carver, who explains how the technology is now becoming an educational equalizer across the state. In 2015, Georgia school districts are expected to have a 33-fold increase in bandwdith available to them through the program. "This will help to flatten the state. No more haves or have-nots in terms of bandwidth going into the school districts."
Surely it's not free to the taxpayers.
The article doesn't mention anything about how this "impressive" infrastructure is maintained.
Do they have a bunch of tinker fairies that live in Georgia that we don't know about???
This is just a dupe of a story from 1860 with a few minor details changed. Here's the original:
"The Luxury of a Bottomless Bucket of Labor For Georgia Plantation Owners"
The Cotton Plantations across Georgia have a luxury that most Oligarchs could only dream of â" access to about 2,800,000 slaves and a private labor ownership that they an always count on. The private labor configuration allows the perk of not focusing on wages. "Our local overseers even take some pleasure in telling pesky northern labor representatives, 'If you can beat free, then I'm willing to listen.' That tends to shut down most conversations," writes Slave Management Specialist Curt Carver, who explains how the free labor is now becoming an educational equalizer across the South. In 1861, Georgia school districts are expected to have a 33-fold increase in free labor available to them through selective breeding. "This will help to flatten the state. No more haves or have-nots in terms of labor going into the cotton fields."
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
And I wish people would stop talking about as such its unlimited everything is run by peering agreements were the backbone providers just exchange traffic for free. The only charge is the last mile of infrastructure and theres no reason that has to be expensive either.
Really. Bandwidth is useless unless you actually have a use for it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/30/us/racketeering-trial-opens-in-altanta-schools-cheating-scandal.html?_r=0
http://www.ajc.com/s/news/school-test-scores/#top-stories
All the bandwidth in the world can't fix the rampant corruption and graft in school districts throughout Georgia.
The "great equalizer" is throwing those shitheads in jail and taking back the millions in taxpayer money paid as performance bonuses.
'If you can beat free, then I'm willing to listen.'
Well, someone should tell them its not free, its just that they don't get the bill. Its not clear from the article what the actual cost is.
a private cloud that they an always count on
I hope they share this cloud technology with the rest of the world, so we can all have access to a cloud we can count on. This sounds almost too good to be true, but if the CIO said it, it must be true!
I'd like to see some interviews from the departmental IT staff that use this always available, unlimited use bandwidth and cloud.
This doesn't seem like a good Free Market solution. The state of Georgia could save a lot of money by having private enterprises, with expertise in these areas, sell bandwidth to individual schools. It's just a short move from this, to the communism that is municipal broadband.
In Soviet Georgia, Shevardnadze YOU
I only recently finished convincing all my non-technie friends that the Internet is not a series of tubes; now I have to start explaining to them that bandwidth does not actually come in buckets. Do you realize how many pounds of email I'll have to write about this? Fuck it, I quit.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
And proves pretty well, that the government can and does do things better than private corporations.
The key is that the government works best when the service/commodity in questions needs to go to everyone and does not truly have inherent differences in quality, besides quantity.
The internet fits this bill, just like water, electricity, and roads.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
They have a heart. That's why we love them instead of you. No one could ever love you, which upsets you doesn't it? Go ahead. Admit it to yourself.
From the article:
"Squirrels in Georgia like their fiber, there are always squirrels chewing on fiber lines somewhere, "
Thank you slashdot for continuing to warn society about the ever present squirrel menace: http://hardware.slashdot.org/s... http://beta.slashdot.org/submi... https://www.google.com/#q=slas...
I wonder how many jobs the state lost for this communist nirvana. Not so much the telecom jobs, because any state endeavor is going to employ 4 useless people to do the job of one productive individual. But all that infrastructure comes with a great big government check - that is inevitably written against a great big tax. Taxes are the unseen killer in any economy.
It is also worth calling out the studies coming out showing, remarkably, that you cannot replace Teaching with Technology. No rational person would argue for a return to ink and quills. But technology for technology's sake is no better. Comprehensive teacher evaluations and the ability to easily and cheaply fire bad teachers would be infinitely more beneficial to students than sub second ping times.
I'm happy for all those CIOs with all that bandwidth. Deliriously happy. But wait, has there ever been a CIO who didn't have lots of bandwidth compared to average people?
Tell me about the real people who benefit from this. The college students, high school students, government employees, etc. Oh, that's for the future? So why are we reading this on slashdot?
...omphaloskepsis often...
Bottomless buckets aren't very useful.
Now all the fibre is installed and paid for by someone else should be given away to honest to god corporation so they make a rent seeking profit of it for a worse limited service.
It is the american way!
We'll know this is working and improving education when we see GA become a blue state.
You mean your own IQ is too low to figure out how to change it?
I couldn't find anything in the article where it explained where the magic fairies created the network out of dreams and wishes. Someone had to pay for the "2,800 miles of free fiber" because it couldn't have been donated all of those responsible, well-meaning corporations out there. Too many government officials confuse free with "didn't come out of our budget".
Was this project sponsored by democrats? I don't want to make this a partisan issue but after reading that republican politicians are so intent on corporate handouts, they're demanding the billeting of a navy in a state without a sea-port, I'm compelled. So can Republicans build infrastructure that works (without half the country sinking), or are they all bat-shit crazy? I must make that assumption, when blood 'n' brimstone republican John Boehner is denounced for being soft.
This is good for the State of GA, but overall is not a paradigm shift...many states have been running Research and Education networks for years. NCREN (MCNC.org) has been offering a similar model for years to UNC system schools and private colleges and universities. It's now been expanded (through grants and foundation funding) to a footprint that touches virtually all K12 as well. It's a combination of owned fiber, IRU's (and some ISP connections to some K12 sites). The UNC institutions have a minimum of 1 gig uplinks for small schools and multiple 10 gigs for the research extensive institutions. This allows unlimited traffic on-net, including private cloud services. NCREN peers with major traffic destinations (like Google) and with major area ISP's like Time Warner to keep local traffic local, minimize commodity Internet bandwidth and keep routing links short. NCREN hosts nodes from major CDN's like Akamai for the same reasons. NCREN has connections to Internet2 and enormous pipes to various commodity Internet providers. Connecting institutions pay a fee based on the pipe size at the campus demarc, and on the amount of commodity Internet bandwidth they want to offer. It allows the community to create the right incentive framework for private clouds and the use of public clouds like Google. It's a good model, and it's good that Georgia has moved in this direction.