In short, no. With such a wide variety of technologies now available, rural schools should not let their location dictate connectivity speeds. This being said, nearly half of primary schools and a third of secondary schools are still reporting inadequate broadband.* Showing the UK speed availability, BT have distributed the below pie chart.
Although it makes great viewing as a pie chart with such a small part of the pie experiencing less than 10Mbps speeds, this still equates to an extremely large number of schools that are unable to achieve a suitable connection. Furthermore those that are shown in the 50-100Mbps may only be achieving this level as a download speeds, with their upload speed being significantly lower. The average upload speed for an affordable 50Mbps connection is only 8-10Mbps. This is becoming crucial for schools as they push and pull in large groups e.g. classroom of pupils at a time.
With over a decade of experience in the Education sector and understanding the importance of a strong Internet connection in education establishments, Oakford Internet Services were awarded Rural Broadband Specialists in 2015 after being acknowledged for fighting against poor broadband speeds in rural settings. The Internet continues to play a pivotal and ever increasing role in the education of young people therefore, the need for a safe, secure and responsive Education Broadband Solution is a necessity. Recognising the importance of broadband in schools, the government understand that rural children are missing out on “huge chunks of the curriculum” therefore, have proposed that in 2020 every Briton should have the legal right to request access Internet speeds of 10Mbps and above.* Without a successful Education Broadband Solution, young people become isolated from the extensive array of education resources that are available online.
Additionally to online education resources, schools are also able to use online facilities which can help with general planning and school duties e.g. Microsoft Office 365. BESA’s 2016 ICT Report states that 25% of primary schools and 15% of secondary schools are not currently using cloud technology due to poor Internet connection because of their rural location.* As service providers solely for the Education sector, we wanted every school to have the chance to access these online resources therefore, OIS developed a solution to provide Rural School Broadband that eliminated the expenses and time consumed when installing full fibre lines. With the idea that school broadband should be available despite your location, we use broadband lines and combine those together, enabling us to deliver the same level of performance but at a much lower price point. Even without broadband available, we are able to use satellite, 3G/4G or any combination of technologies to provide a service for your school.
Once you are online, we continue to make sure that your School Broadband Solution is perfectly tailored to your school. As School Broadband providers, we ensure our broadband services are filtered and monitored to a very high standard. To ensure the safety and security of our young people, we have built secure multi datacentre networks and also provide one of the very best Internet filtering services available. Although there are many other School Broadband providers that offer great filtering and monitoring services, one of the key features of our filtering solution is that we are able to filter in multiple languages, where as other filtering packages will only filter in English.
So the question is, do you still think you should be receiving poor broadband speeds because of your area?
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