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So we are now an academy and I've been looking at the future of the LEA supplied broadband service that we have been using for the last five years. The only advantage I can think of keeping it is that everything is bundled and to be fair it does work. But with the advances in video and multimedia on the internet such as iPlayer and YouTube we are consistently reaching our capacity so its time to look at our options.



Disadvantages of current LEA supplied Broadband
- Slow 10/10mbit fiber link
- Very expensive after the harnessing technologies grant has gone the council want to charge us treble the amount it used to cost
- Managed firewall is difficult and bureaucratic to change
- Central backbone seems limited (we share it with 40 other schools)
- Cache pilot filtering (which in my opinion is very poor slow technology)
- Inability to chop and change services

I went and got a few quotes from various suppliers for full fiber lines right down to cable and VDSL technologies.

Currently we are evaluating BT Infinity VDSL connection.

I just got a new telephone line installed in the school for 100 quid and ordered BT business infinity, it costs £55 a month with 8 IP addresses. Very happy with it so far but it remains to be seen if it can service the whole school over the next couple of years.

Speed test for the new BT "infinity" Connection.


Compare that to our current Easynet LEA supplied line

Speed test for the old Easynet LEA connection.


The new connection is clearly faster both in response times and raw speed.

As far as testing goes I just set the router up disabling the wireless and DHCP options. Then I gave it an ip that is just 1 different to our current router. I then change a client PC to use the new IP as a gateway and everything worked smoothly without needing to change any other network settings. The new connection is noticeably faster than our current 10mbit fiber line which is not really surprising since its 3x the speed and has no filtering at the moment.

One other thing I am going to do is move to Live@edu for our email hosting. This means I don't have to mess around with Exchange server or MX records any more. But internet speed and reliability will be key to the success of this hence why I'm looking into it now.

So in summary we can get a quicker, easier to manage and hopefully more future proof line installed for the fraction of the cost of our LEA supplied services. I think we're going to go for it.