 New Tower! Most of you have already noticed the construction outside the MMS auditorium. There's a wireless network tower going up in December, and while it's obviously not improving our 'curb appeal' any, hopefully its usefulness will be worth the ugly.
Who's doing This??...and... who's footing the bill?
As much as ya'll would like to blame MISD Technology Dept for ruining the landscape, this one's not ours.
MISD, along with Abilene, Wylie, and 30-something other rural school and hospital districts, is a member of the West Texas Telecommunications Consortium, or WTTC. WTTC allows us to pool our buying power for resources such as Internet service, software, and network support.
WTTC is implementing an ambitious development project designed to bring high-speed wireless Internet to all schools in the area. Trent, Sweetwater, Merkel & the Region 14 Service Center are all included in Phase I of this project.
It's being paid for with 41/42 funds, meaning the district is NOT spending any money on this. Although we may opt for some landscaping later :-)
How Will MISD Benefit? Internet service is currently provided to MHS through a single T1 connection. All other campuses, including Tye, share another, separate T1 connection.
The 'raw' speed of a T1 connection is 1.544 Mbps.
Without getting too geeky, that means that MHS's connection to the Internet is less than 2% of the speed of the SLOWEST internal connections. So on the days when the Internet seems slow - that's because it is.
This new Internet connection will be about 65 times faster than the existing connections.
So, in the spring , when everyone's working on research, projects and eBay, you should see a SIGNIFICANT increase in throughput. It will also make a huge difference in the quality of the video connections from Region14 and area schools.
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