Peter wrote:
> And a 120-way switch (can't use a router at that ratio) ? And a couple
> of feet of gigabit ethernet to connect it to a suitable server in its
> own 19" rack ? With a connection to an air conditioner to prevent it
> from melting, a UPS, and serious soundproofing so people can hear what
> the teacher is saying over the whine of the 12-20 cooling fans in the
> rack ?

I think you're sensationalizing this a bit.  You're not trying to give
everyone a pristine 10Mb/sec network connection, but something more reliable
than WiFi.  With 120 users the total bandwidth requirements are going to
exceed anything you can supply for a reasonable price.  And of course you
don't do this in a single 120:1 step.  8:1 or 16:1 switches are cheap,
available, and don't require much power.  Two tiers of switches should do
this fine.

I would look into throttling the bandwidth of each individual connection
coming out of the second tier switches.  However, I don't know anything
about this and whether such things are cheaply and readily available.  If
each individual line was limited to 1Mb/sec, things should work out well
enough.  I have no idea if there are switches available that do something
like that already or not.  If not, this sounds like a product idea for cases
just like this.  Maybe this can be combined with a small HTTP proxy server
since the web references for a class are likely to be very correlated.  I
don't know how to easily configure each student's computer to that proxy
server just while in that class though.  Oh well, just a thought, and
probably not a good one.

If each student in the class had 1Mb/sec available, that would still allow
most people to get the full bandwidth most of the time.  It's a lot better
than most DSL connections, and should be more than sufficient for anything
you should be legitimately doing in a class.


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