This is good for the State of GA, but overall is not a paradigm shift...many states have been running Research and Education networks for years. NCREN (MCNC.org) has been offering a similar model for years to UNC system schools and private colleges and universities. It's now been expanded (through grants and foundation funding) to a footprint that touches virtually all K12 as well. It's a combination of owned fiber, IRU's (and some ISP connections to some K12 sites). The UNC institutions have a minimum of 1 gig uplinks for small schools and multiple 10 gigs for the research extensive institutions. This allows unlimited traffic on-net, including private cloud services. NCREN peers with major traffic destinations (like Google) and with major area ISP's like Time Warner to keep local traffic local, minimize commodity Internet bandwidth and keep routing links short. NCREN hosts nodes from major CDN's like Akamai for the same reasons. NCREN has connections to Internet2 and enormous pipes to various commodity Internet providers. Connecting institutions pay a fee based on the pipe size at the campus demarc, and on the amount of commodity Internet bandwidth they want to offer. It allows the community to create the right incentive framework for private clouds and the use of public clouds like Google. It's a good model, and it's good that Georgia has moved in this direction.

This is an outstanding use for a Chromebook. Has built in guest mode and while any computing device is subject to malware compromise, a Chromebook is *much* less susceptible. Also, very affordable. I'm typing this on my $249 Chromebook. I've been using Chrome OS devices for nearly a year now, and as long as you understand what it is and what it's not, you'll be happy...