"DNSBOX was easy to deploy – it didn’t require much training to get started. The ApplianSys support engineers guiding us understood our technical requirements well – we were assured that we were in good hands."
Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), USA "We now have an extremely high up time. The system is very reliable, and our IT teams are now able to focus on the job in hand"
Richard Thomson, London Business School "The support is rock solid and I look forward to working with you again"
James Locker, Systems Administrator, St Francis Catholic High School, USA "I think that its a very good product at a very good price point."
Pablo Charpentier, CEO, Rua-Tec, Costa Rica "We found that other solutions were not as efficient as CACHEBOX which caches on the fly ..."
Ray Taylor, CEO, Taylor Communications, New Zealand

Cullman culls duplicate downloads

September 17, 2026
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ApplianSys is pleased to announce that Cullman City School District has deployed CACHEBOX, funded through E-Rate, to accelerate classroom content and take Chromebook updates off its network.

The district supports around 3,500 students across five campuses, on an estate that is almost entirely Chromebooks. Its campuses connect back to the core on a 10G link, soon to be upgraded to 40G, with 2Gbps from the core out to the internet.

That internet connection runs at around 80% utilisation, and the core upgrade was already planned, so capacity was not what the district was buying. Caching was bought to deliver classroom content faster and to take Chromebook update downloads off the network altogether.

Both are problems that more bandwidth handles poorly and caching handles well. Update traffic is almost entirely duplicated across a Chromebook estate, so a single local copy serves every device that follows. And content served from within the network arrives at LAN speed, avoiding the upstream delays that a larger connection does nothing to fix.

The district has deployed a CACHEBOX420, sourced through E-Rate with technology partner Synergetics DCS.

“The FCC is considering sunsetting E-Rate. Whatever it decides, a network built to carry the same download thousand times needs upgrading again and again, and each of those upgrades depends on funding that may not be there. Relying on bandwidth alone only looked safe while the money was certain,” says Chris Newman of ApplianSys, whose analysis of district caching data underpinned the company’s submissions to the FCC.