In support of the K-12 students in Texas, the Texas Education Telecommunications Network (TETN) provides services to enhance the classroom experiences of students in school districts throughout the state that are supported through the 20 Education Service Centers (ESC) throughout Texas. As classroom teachers become ever more dependent on bandwidth to support their needs to deliver quality education, TETN continues to add bandwidth capacity to serve the ESCs, with four more members expanding to 10Gbps connections within the past year. Recognizing that network expansion means that additional management tools will be needed, TETN continues to improve its security and bandwidth management services as well as its video content platforms.
TETN provides a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) solution to five of the ESCs to prevent downtime due to attacks. These types of attacks are becoming more prevalent and thus are causing more issues for our school districts. TETN purchased a solution through a third-party vendor and maintains it for those ESCs that choose to participate. DDoS attacks are mitigated with the solution thus preventing ESCs from having long periods of downtime that would impact the districts they service.
As video becomes increasingly in demand in classrooms, TETN's network connects ESCs and districts with the broadband capability needed to expand their video services. Videoconferencing has always been a primary use of the network and as this technology becomes more cloud-based, TETN is utilizing more cloud services to support the ESCs who in turn support the districts. This year TETN purchased cloud services through AWS to provide scalability in their cloud bridging and desktop video platform. Needed bandwidth is available to send large amounts of video for special programs and now the service is available in the cloud to "burst" and scale when needed. In addition to the video cloud service, TETN has also added service for ESCs and district personnel to have a video content portal to upload and distribute videos. Videos available on the portal are used to provide information to students who may have missed class or need additional assistance on homework as well as providing videos produced for projects and training.
As a part of the LEARN community, school districts enjoy the tremendous benefits of the caching services provided through LEARN, with Microsoft and Google being the largest suppliers of cached content to schools. This enables school districts to continue classroom work without interruptions on the days when products from those companies have large software upgrades that can shut down a network.
The Texas Education Telecommunications Network is proud to be included in the membership of LEARN and is particularly gratified that LEARN's services significantly enhance the high quality of service that TETN provides to Educational Service Centers and school districts throughout Texas. TETN truly adds value to LEARN's educational mission.