For modern educators, the internet is no longer seen as a luxury or a supplementary tool to use in the classroom — it is a necessity, as vital as paper and pencils. For the Calgary Catholic School District, the largest catholic school district in Western Canada, ensuring the internet stays on for its 64,000+ students and staff is a massive undertaking.
Cybera has been working with Calgary Catholic staff to re-architect their network. The goal has been to not only overcome current bandwidth constraints, but to prepare the school district for future data demands. This collaboration highlights a critical reality for education stakeholders everywhere: as digital skills continue to advance, the digital infrastructure of the schools teaching those skills must also evolve.
The “utility” of education networks
The sheer scale of data moving through Calgary Catholic’s network offers a glimpse into the future of K-12 learning. On a typical school day, the district sees approximately 700,000 internet sessions running at any given moment.
The demand is driven heavily by cloud-based offerings from Google and Microsoft — in addition to video tutorials on YouTube — which have become fundamental to curriculum delivery. As Mike Meyer,
senior manager of infrastructure and operations at Calgary Catholic, notes, teachers now view the internet as a “utility that needs to be on and available at all times.”
This growth in internet use has been dramatic. Four years ago, the district was utilizing 3-4 Gigabits per second (Gbps) of bandwidth. Today, that number has jumped to over 8 Gbps. This increased capacity is necessary: it means the district can upgrade the software on its 25,000 Chromebooks in a matter of hours (not days) and enable hundreds of classrooms to stream 4K videos, without buffering.
Even after the province mandated limits on social media use in schools, the educational demand for data has continued to climb.
A smarter network
To meet this growing demand, Cybera helped Calgary Catholic upgrade its network capacity from 10 Gbps to 25 Gbps. This involved more than a simple hardware swap-out. It required a strategic re-architecture of the district’s network, which stretches between 120 schools and six district offices.
By optimizing Cybera’s network connections in Calgary, Calgary Catholic staff were able to reduce the amount of fibre strands initially planned for the upgrade. Moving fully to Cybera’s network data centre also provided the district with easier after-hours access to its network hardware, increasing their team’s ability to respond to technical issues. Perhaps most importantly, the new architecture is future-proof, set up to easily scale to 40 Gbps as data needs grow over the next decade.
This upgrade is timely. Eric Villeneuve, technical analyst team leader at Calgary Catholic, notes that while the school district has met internet demands so far, the integration of AI into the classroom represents the next “big data suck.” Artificial Intelligence tools, personalized learning algorithms, and higher-definition video content will require massive amounts of bandwidth.
By re-architecting their network now, Calgary Catholic has removed the barriers to growing later on, allowing them to focus on small adjustments rather than crisis management.
The value of the Research and Education Network
What makes this collaboration unique is its use of the National Research and Education Network (NREN) efficiency model.
Cybera provides Calgary Catholic with “uncapped peering.” In simple terms, this means traffic is routed directly to major content providers (like Google and Microsoft) through NREN pathways, rather than traversing more expensive commercial internet. This means staff and students can watch hundreds of thousands of educational YouTube videos, and the district will not have to pay extra for that network traffic.
This efficiency also means Calgary Catholic is effectively paying the same amount for its new 25 Gbps connection as it did for a 10 Gbps connection. This is a powerful example of how the NREN model maximizes public funding to deliver digital services.
Passing this lesson on
While Calgary Catholic’s technical setup, like any other Alberta K-12 institution, is unique, the philosophy behind it is replicable across Alberta.
Cybera’s specialist role within the province means our network team understands the needs and constraints of achieving scalable and cost-effective connectivity in education. We welcome the opportunity to have similar discussions with all K-12 institutions, no matter their size, to understand their unique constraints, and help them find efficient solutions to support their data-hungry learning.
As we move further into the 21st Century, ensuring our schools have the digital infrastructure to compete globally is not just an IT issue, it’s a societal imperative.