My school has some serious bandwidth issues

[roboplex22]

Just a disclosure, this post has no real substance, I just wanted to share something I thought was pretty funny.

 

So I decided to do some internet Speedtests at my High school. One during class time, and one during lunch. Both on the same, public wifi network for students. What I found made me just start laughing. If the server had a brain, I can just imagine it would be thinking "Doing ok...doing ok...doing ok...OH CRAP ITS 11:45...BOOM!"

 

During Class:

 

During Lunch: 

[terrytek]

holy fuck. mine gets about 500MB/s down, 700MB/s up. it's insane.

[Badazzz]

Oh gosh. Looks like they need more bands on their routers.

[itsmyjobtoknow]

Well during lunch, there should be a lot of users hitting it all at the same time....so it's kinda expected. 

[Mjvdk]

Mine dies slowly even during class

[TetraSky]

More people using it at the same time during the break could cause that.

Either that, or your school is throttling during break because they are scums. All while leaving it "untouched" during class, either for class material (if you have those electronic blackboards or they allow laptop usage during class or something) or for the computer room's class.

[Oshino Shinobu]

If it's from the WiFi, it may be an issue with overloading the AP(s). At my college, the hardwired connection was good (200Mbps +), but the WiFi was constantly at about 5Mbps because so many people were connected at once. 

[roboplex22]

holy fuck. mine gets about 500MB/s down, 700MB/s up. it's insane.

On the desktop PCs , it gets about 100up and down, but that was during class time. Im not sure how those are during lunch though.

[exercutor5]

Meh, mine while in class is like less than 1 megabit per second up and down. During lunch is worse, when everyone starts playing games.

[roboplex22]

More people using it at the same time during the break could cause that.

Either that, or your school is throttling during break because they are scums. All while leaving it "untouched" during class, either for class material (if you have those electronic blackboards or they allow laptop usage during class or something) or for the computer room's class.

I seriously wouldn't doubt that they're throttling the speeds. I know for a fact that the district is just a bunch of scumbags. All the teachers are protesting their low wages/no pay raises, and they're focused on making us wear uniforms next year . But back to the point, I did notice that in the beginning of the year the wifi was a hell of a lot faster at lunch. It's either because nobody had bothered to connect yet, or they hadn't started throttling.

[asiancorruption]

my highschool gets 80 down 30 up and we have 1 router for every 2 classes so connectivity is never a problem

[roboplex22]

If it's from the WiFi, it may be an issue with overloading the AP(s). At my college, the hardwired connection was good (200Mbps +), but the WiFi was constantly at about 5Mbps because so many people were connected at once. 

Funnily enough, I'm actually in the Networking track of the Academies they have. I'm gonna ask my teacher and see if we can find out what's up. Maybe he can give us the answer. 

[steezemageeze]

Why does it get throttled like that at lunch? Wouldn't more students be on it during class times?

[catzambia]

Unrelated, but if you guys wanted a laugh there's a kid at my school that thinks nintendo will go after him for downloading roms.

/facepalm

[catzambia]

Why does it get throttled like that at lunch? Wouldn't more students be on it during class times?

Imagine a couple hundred kids on a couple APs, versus a few on one AP during classtime

[steezemageeze]

Imagine a couple hundred kids on a couple APs, versus a few on one AP during classtime

 

But why are they using the AP's during lunch? Their phones?

[catzambia]

But why are they using the AP's during lunch? Their phones?

Yeah

[klh2000]

The WiFi at my school is usually around 50 Mbps, the wired is a symmetrical 500 Mbps

[Guest]

Lets make a connection!
 

More people are using the network, and since schools do load balancing, I'd say that is normal for a school during lunch.

[steezemageeze]

Yeah

 

That makes more sense. I didn't think of it because my school doesn't let us use our phones during lunch. Sorry for butting in

[Xizerz]

the internet situation in my district is a disaster. they have all internet traffic go through their servers downtown which severy increases the ping, and even though the speed is something crazy like 900mbps down, it takes a full 10 seconds to load a webpage. but to make it all worse, they decided that their "servers" (more like a giant packet sniffer) couldn't take all the heat of everyone in the county using the internet thst they just disabled the wifi. the networks are still there and everything, but it will not join ut no matter what. the lucky teachers are allowed to have it, but only one device at a time. This seriously bugs me

[Blake]

-snip

You're all looking at youtube, stop it.

[Guest]

Chances are that is either auto load balancing being done albeit unlikely. Most likely it's due to AP overload. During class times you'll have a distributed load of students across AP's throughout the campus. Lunch rocks around and all those devices move to one of three main areas: locker bays, library & study areas and general open spaces such as cafeterias. You'll suddenly have 500 devices + trying to connect to a limited number of AP's in that area.

[leadeater]

I seriously wouldn't doubt that they're throttling the speeds. I know for a fact that the district is just a bunch of scumbags. All the teachers are protesting their low wages/no pay raises, and they're focused on making us wear uniforms next year . But back to the point, I did notice that in the beginning of the year the wifi was a hell of a lot faster at lunch. It's either because nobody had bothered to connect yet, or they hadn't started throttling.

 

Actually what you are seeing is a classic sign of the internet firewall/proxy not using bandwidth shaping (throttling). Without proper configuration of bandwidth shaping when traffic demand gets high it is equivalent to DoS attack. The firewall has no information on what traffic is important, who needs how much etc and just drops packets when the demand is higher than the bandwidth that is available so you get very erratic speed test, browsing or just the complete inability to use the internet at all till people start to give up.

 

I've had a school of 1400 students happily using a 9Mbps internet connection with bandwidth shaping rules in place, without it internet is unusable for everyone. That particular school now has 500Mbps but that's not really the point.

 

Bandwidth shaping/throttling is your friend not your enemy.

 

Also yea it can also be overloaded access points too as others have mentioned, testing on wired connection will confirm which it is or combination of both.

[Sam Harradine]

They have wifi at school now? Shit