YHGFL Broadband

Our LEA has recently moved our ISP from BT to YHGFL and for the last two weeks there has not been a day where our Internet is either really slow, disconnected or we are not receiving emails. Does anyone else have these issues with YHGFL? Have YHGFL taken on too many schools as it seems they don't have the capacity?

Its not YHGFL Broadband that are the issue, its with Bull that the problems with internet and email lay.
I believe that all traffic is first routed through Bull and then on to YHGFL, this is because the middle school across the road from us pulled the old BT connection out and the network manager was rung up by a guy from YHGFL asking why they'd lost the connection to the school, who explained how the new internet set up worked and in his opinion gave schools al ess than impressive service.

and yes it is a rubbish service, we had no internet just before an ofsed inspection was due to take place the VP has hopping mad.
have u seen any of the reports from schools ict and NYCC about the problems with the internet and email it makes interesting reading.

It states that they had a few rouge schools who in the first few weeks flooded the network with requests and goes an to say that they failed to Anticipate the amount of traffic on the network which is a load of old bulls**t.
Because u know how many schools are in NYCC and the number of students.
It was more a case of trying to get cheapest package they could get a way with, and it has come and bit them back in the arse.
they have upgraded the internet and email over the half term to help with demand and reliablitiy but its anyone guess if it works.
Sorry about the ramble its been so frustrating probably like your self with the internet and email, me and my colleague have been on the phone to schools ict at least 3 times a week about the service and its like talking to a brick wall.

Not sure if this is the same service but if it's the same service as North Yorks we actually had an improvement recently.

One of the heads on my first school met the new head of procurements for NY and complained. The new bod apparently took him seriously and promised that no further payments would be made till it was sorted... Within a few week we had a SchoolsICT tech out (one who really knows his stuff) to check the connection quality and he proved the problems we'd been having for ages.

Within about 3 more weeks they resolved the issues regarding our connectivity and it seems that the MLL node used by the school (and one other that I provide support for) has been finally fixed.. I suspect said procurement head held back payments and starting talking penalties so MLL finally pulled their finger out their b*tt.

Now the problems are more to do with FTP use which is a mess (slow doesn't cover it)... and poor sustained connection speed... You can tell you're on a contention ratio of 1:20 or more.

All in all, not great but certainly better than it was...

Either way I still don't understand why we're paying £4.5 for a years broadband service that could be better supported with two aggregated ADSL connections at half the price.

I just got off the phone to our LEA and they've promised that an upgrade will take place this weekend and they hope it will fix things. We pay 10k for whats supposed to be a 10Mb connection. Today it has been taking 50secs for Google's front page to load!

10K that's less than half the price of ours so lucky you.

Ben

We are fellow sufferers too.

About a month ago they forgot to tell us they were updating and wiped out our mail relay out for 2 days.

These last couple of weeks we've noticed a significant slow down in the speed of the internet connection. Only lost connection for a couple of half days in the half term though.

The new filtering (using all open source!) is set a bit too restrictive though. However the new spam filtering is great. Spam has gone from 200-300 per week to 10-20 a week.

More on the update http://www.siriusit.co.uk/index.php/clients/yhgfl

I can confirm that our LEA also moved from BT to YHGFL and from October to April the problems were terrible, loss of connection, slow connections but the worst was the filtering element of the connection. Trying to get to the safest of sites was sometimes a problem due to the weighting system they use to filter the sites. Then we had a re occuring problem of being added to the correct filter list then suddenly finding we were not added to it and not being able to get anywhere really on the net.
Now here's the big however... since meetings were held with YHGFL the service has been alot better since April with no major connection or filtering problems :D (well apart from switches at YHGFL going down and leaving us with no Internet when Ofsted came a calling :cry: ). So it may be a case of weathering the storm for a while untill it all settles down.

Thankfully the issue's now resolved and Internet back to normal. Took some shouting to get resolved though!

All I've had all day is complaints that hotmail is blocked.

It appears over the weekend someone took the desicion to add it to the blacklist. Didn't bother with yahoo mail or google mail though.

Oh and there is now a block on attachments over 5Mb.

After a bit of searching I found this site - a nice wiki on all the changes and settings. Why we weren't sent this by our LA I don't know :?

Thanks for the link, some good info there, I see they have lots of ? in their SLA which explains things. Having worked mainly in the private sector I sometimes can't believe the poor support and service we get for these services.

Anyway aside from the rant, we have seen a large reduction in spam since the migration, perhaps thanks to debian :)

Looking at that wiki, it's becoming obvious that North Yorkshire's MLL Telecom based system is completely different to this solution from YHGFL.

All the same problems as Steve here, trying to be patient but taking loads of flak about Hotmail (which was unblocked yesterday and is bannned again today). Just recieved the letter from our authority (WMDC) about the problems and planned solutions. Interested to hear some opinons on the proposals, what do you all think? The move took out our website which is still down on the usual url. Thanks for the link to the YH Public Web.

Just to add to this, we have YHGFL in Sheffield and the service is at best mediocre. Speed can be awful thorughout the day with many sites not displaying correctly or being blocked for no apparent reason. hotmail comes and goes, much to the dismay of the teachers who then shout at me about it.

I resisted moving to this service in the first place and it has been nothing but trouble.
Was using a filtered 2mb DSL service before and it was much more efficient.

I have checked, and NYCC's system is not delivered through YHGfL at all. There have been problems with Internet and e-mail in North Yorkshire schools, but credit where it is due the service has improved considerably since May. There are still issues with some of the functionality in e-mail, but the service now seems much more stable.