Here is an explanation on why so many districts are having bandwidth problems in the State of North Dakota. The core state router is located on a 10G fiber metro ring that connects to your School through a 1 Gig connection. However, the fiber connecting back to the State of ND core only offers 2G and is shared with other users in Dickinson State, as well as other County Courthouses, Libraries and K12 school districts in the surrounding area. As a result, your school's router is also connected to the Dickinson Metro switch at 1G. Dickinson State College is a main hub for the rest of southwest North Dakota and the surrounding areas as you can see by the map.

Whenever the 1G bandwidth is being utilized by traffic to/from School, other traffic will have to wait in a queue until bandwidth becomes available again. Additionally, traffic going to/from the State of NDcore/internet is limited to 2G. When traffic hits 2G, it will have to wait in a queue until bandwidth becomes available again. This will mean things will become unresponsive or packets will get dropped.‍

Unfortunately, this week and last week (March 27-31st), bandwidth has frequently hit 2G when going to/from the State of ND core.  Until the existing infrastructure is upgraded past the 2G connection back to Bismarck as it is a hub for the states 565,180 ip address so things will be slow or unresponsive.

There are solutions that Smart Computers and Consulting can provide such as the Appliansys Cache box to alleviate some of the congestion and reduce the overall bandwidth your school is using. This would result in a perceived speed increase especially on content or updates that has already been visited or cached. This would provide a work around until ITD can increase the oval bandwidth allocated.

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