BYOD Challenges School System Infrastructure

Last year, Georgia’s Forsyth County school system introduced a BYOD policy in the school system. The number of devices accessing the networks jumped from 10,000 to 19,000 from previous spring to the next school year. This dramatic increase in devices caused infrastructure problems within the school system. According to Tanya Roscorla at The Center for Digital Education, the schools initially suffered from  interruption of services.[1]

Internet usage had become part of classroom education, but when so many devices started crowding the system, some teachers could not access the Internet during classes. As a result, class instruction was disrupted, and the school had to scramble to adapt. Overwhelming the system is a threat in classrooms, companies and healthcare when BYOD policies are enacted.

Bailey Mitchell, chief technology and information officer of Georgia’s Forsyth County Schools, spearheaded the BYOD adoption in the Georgia school system, and now he is talking about the challenges IT should anticipate. “IT leaders have no idea how much bandwidth usage will grow once students bring their own devices to school for learning,” explain Mitchell. ”They do not have adequate infrastructure to enable an environment where potentially every other or every student has a device.”

Forsyth County ended up tripling their Internet connection to 1.3 GB, and 2 GB-per-second on the wide are networks. Campus networks have been upgraded to 802.11n for higher performance and ability to scale with mobile devices. Forsyth Country has also introduced a fully meshed network backbone. ”We’ve been able to justify that expense because when the network blips, it’s such an impact on instruction that it’s absolutely unacceptable,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell and his staff a keep a regular watch on network usage and is prepared to scale bandwidth as more teachers and students adopt the BYOD policy.

The challenges facing Forsyth County are challenges common to all facilities embracing BYOD policies. IT should migrate to 802.11n for more reliable and predictable coverage. You should also have a scalable network solution as more users adopt BYOD. In the next post, I’ll cover a few other challenges businesses should prepare to support in migrating to a BYOD policy.

[1]  Tanya Roscorla. “Bring Your Own Device Prompts School Infrastructure Investments.” The Center for Digital Education, March 13, 2012.