School's broadband question...

[cheredenine]

Its budget time and, althought its been agreed, our governors were concerned over the cost of our broadband connection. Our business manager has aked me to have a round-up of the issues so she is suitable armed with facts for next time; I've not looked into this sort of thing for a while, so i'm struggling, however.

I thought school's had some obligation to use a suitable broadband connection - Becta accredited or connected to the National Educational Network, but after a look on Becta's site i'm having trouble finding anything that specifies what exactly. As it turns out the Becta Accreditation isn't a required thing at all; our regional provider in norfolk (E2BN) doesn't appear to be accredited at all, currently.

Anyone have any pointers to what i'm after?

[Soulfish]

You have to have suitable filtering. This is usually provided by your RBN, and/or running your own inhouse filtering (smoothwall for example). How much are you paying for what speed?

[kevbaz]

Were paying £10k P/a for 40mb asynchronous, we have swgfl filtering and we have ISA, dunno if that helps at all for comparison?

[cheredenine]

Our connection is undoubtedly expensive - something like £28000. The infrastructure has apparently been upgraded recently from 10mb to 100mb, though they've yet to actually unlease these speeds - a recent speedtest.net outing showed approx 9mb down and 6.5mb up. We'll probably see increases soon as they manage to get BT to finish tweaking the last few rural connections...

What i'm getting at here is that its common sense that we should subscribe to a robust service with filtering, etc, but i'm looking for some official source (Becta, DCFS, whatever) that spells out a schools obligations - a document i can give our business manage to quote, you know?

[Soulfish]

That is quite expensive. I know we're paying around 10k for 30mbit up/down.

Unfortunately I don't know of any official documents that spells out your obligations.

[Jobos]

Were paying £10k P/a for 40mb asynchronous, we have swgfl filtering and we have ISA, dunno if that helps at all for comparison?

That's a good price as we're moving to the EMBC 10Mb line soon at a cost of £12K P/A

[Stuart_C]

But surely as it's asynchronous it's only down not up.
We are jsut about to move over to BT for a 10K (inc VAT) Leased line, 10Mb in both directions.. We're moving away from RM as they couldn't match the price (or get near it) so I'm loosing my external filtering but we have our own inhouse. Just means that i have to rely on belt rather than belt and braces filtering.

[dhicks]

I'm just configuring our Internet connection now. Two uncontended ADSL 2+ lines (theoretically capable of 24Mb/s, but the ISP reckons we'll get 9Mb/s on each) joined together in to one gateway with a PC running ZeroShell as a load-balancing router. Costs us £50 per month per line, so £1,200 per year for 18Mb/s. SmoothWall for filtering, so another £2,000(?) per year.

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David Hicks

[cheredenine]

I'm just configuring our Internet connection now. Two uncontended ADSL 2+ lines (theoretically capable of 24Mb/s, but the ISP reckons we'll get 9Mb/s on each) joined together in to one gateway with a PC running ZeroShell as a load-balancing router. Costs us £50 per month per line, so £1,200 per year for 18Mb/s. SmoothWall for filtering, so another £2,000(?) per year.

Interesting! Am i right to assume the use of two ADSL lines is intended to raise the total potential download speed, rather than any fault tolerance? I've heard of places using two ADSL lines for fault tolerance, but this was described as lines to different exchanges with different providers...