Schools Broadband

watty

The children who will enter secondary school this year will be setting out on a journey that may lead to the knowledge society, but only if the Government persists with efforts to create the conditions to make it so.

Failure to deliver high-quality third- and fourth-level education will mean the kids may be taking the yellow brick road to Oz, where so many young graduates have already ended up.

What's more, the firms that the educated, highly paid young entrepeneurs of the future will work for, also need the tools to compete -- in particular, a state-of-the-art broadband infrastructure.

Today's report, that 65 schools have turned down an offer of "free" broadband from the Department of Education because they considered it unfit for purpose -- in other words, too slow -- preferring to pay for a better service, shows how much room there is for improvement.

A recent report on telecoms estimated that providing a decent broadband infrastructure would cost the country about €2.5bn, or one-10th of the €22bn that the State is pouring into Anglo Irish Bank.

The smart economy idea was not born out of some glib, political manifesto; over the past five years a number of forward-looking reports spelled out the country's future educational and infrastructural needs.

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/yes-bank-crisis-is-a-priority-but-so-is-renewal-2262584.html

Of course if we are "Smart" and have a "Smart Knowledge Economy" we can probably do proper national fibre Broadband for €1.2 Billion

Sponge Bob

This was a question by Fergus O Dowd. The number of Satellite schools is quite scary.

* For WRITTEN answer on Thursday, 8th July, 2010. Reference Number: 31212/10
Tánaiste Mary Coughlan

Currently my Department supports the following amount of broadband connections in schools

Wireless: 760
DSL: 2158
Satellite: 935
100Mbit/s (pilot project - post primary schools): 78
There are 56 schools awaiting installation and 65 schools have declined a broadband service from the Department.

watty

Thus only 78 schools supplied by Dept out of 4052 have fast enough broadband for an entire school.

Regular broadband could be fast enough for one medium class I suppose, though aren't our class sizes a little large for a "Smart Knowledge Economy"?

The "standard" for Dept Broadband Is I think 3Mbps (Fixed Wireless, DSL or Satellite). Possibly 20:1 or 18:1 contention allowed?

I remember the Wireless specs are close to DSL and the NBS as currently supplied (HSPA or Satellite) wouldn't meet the Schools spec at all that I saw. The schools Satellite spec is lower spec for than the Wireless & DSL (for outages and ping), but higher than NBS satellite if memory serves me.