System Requirements

Additional Network Setup

1. Allowlist IP addresses from FastBridge

• Our site uses both HTTP and HTTPS, and should be on your firewall allowlist. It must be on every firewall; the main one for the computer’s overall network, but also local networks if your district has separate smaller firewall setups at each school (e.g. via a router), or if you utilize Wi-Fi routers with firewall capability. YouTube must be accessible in order to access videos in our knowledge base.
• If you have issues connecting to the FastBridge site, add the following wildcard domains to the allowlist (this can help with older firewalls):

• • *.fastbridge.org
  • *.cloudfront.net

2. Content filtering

This is an option in most firewalls and/or routers with firewall capability. Filtering prevents undesirable sites from being accessed over your network. Turn this off. If you cannot turn this option off, then add our URL to its allowlist. This may be a separate allowlist from the firewall’s main one.

3. Wireless bandwidth congestion

Schools are often in areas of heavy Wi-Fi utilization, causing the Wi-Fi channels to become saturated. When this happens, access to FastBridge can time out, causing unpredictable behavior. Make sure you are optimizing the wireless bandwidth you have at your location.

4. Access Point (AP) load

This occurs when large groups of students or classes in the same physical area are assessed with FastBridge on Wi-Fi-based devices such as netbooks or tablets. The wireless access point at the school suddenly must contend with multiple and potentially hundreds of wireless connections accessing all at the exact same time. Unless your wireless access point is robust enough to handle the surge, students and teachers can often experience lag, dropped connections, failed tests, and so on while the access point contends with managing all those devices. Ask your AP manufacturer to provide you with a maximum number of simultaneous connections that it supports, and make sure to stay inside that amount. Adding access points as you need them during test times could be one way to manage this hurdle.

5. Wi-Fi vs wired

Wired is better. If you can move students to wired machines during testing (even just a portion of them), that can sometimes take the strain off the wireless systems, as mentioned above.

6. Total bandwidth

Because our testing employs streaming audio, the amount of students who can test simultaneously is dependent greatly on your total bandwidth. For example, 50 concurrent students can work with an available bandwidth of 7.5 Mbps, while 500 concurrent testing students require 75 Mbps. Bandwidth is an absolute requirement for FastBridge to operate. Bandwidth should be tested frequently, and especially before a testing window is about to open.

To check bandwidth, use the system diagnostics tool: https://app.fastbridge.org/diagnostics.do

Other Requirements

The required screen resolution is 1200x800 for the best FastBridge experience. For more information, visit Troubleshooting - System Issues.