Bandwidth Consumption and Analysis

Areas of notable bandwidth consumption are from the teacher’s UI to the Student devices while viewing screens in Classroom, and from student devices to the cloud application driven by student activity on device. The teachers navigating around Backdrop will also consume bandwidth loading each page/image from the cloud application, but that is completely in-line with other internet browsing activity in usage.

Viewing student screens is a peer to peer connection, from the student’s device to the teacher’s browser page when requested by the teacher to view screens of students in the class. Video streams are only started for student devices visible in the teacher’s UI and consume around 10kb per device per second on average. This is usually over the local network when situated together, but when the devices cannot communicate directly will go via a cloud service.

Student devices triggering Wellbeing captures need to upload the captured data to the cloud service for processing and later viewing by teachers, these tend to be on the order of 5-10MB per capture (mostly depends on screen size/resolution for a given device).

Information on a device changing based on student input (ie: current browser tabs, etc.) is reported to the cloud system in real time, for an average hours lesson a student device transmits about 5MB of telemetry data.