RBC Costs

I was just wondering what other schools are paying yearly for connection to there RBC and what features are made available to them

We are with EMBC currently and we are paying 12G a year for a 10mb/s feed into school and with that we are getting a Web mail service and filtered internet connection....

We also get access to a portal, but from looking at it, i dont think anyone ever uses it

I would like to get exchange into school, but due to costing and budget, that is out the question at the moment

Round here it's a fixed price (around £1200) plus a per child top up fee of £2/child. At least in the primary schools. I am unsure of the pricing schemes in secondary schools as I have nothing to do with it.

For that, you get SDSL between 2 and 4mbit (soon to be 10mbit once ADSL2 rolls out) + Webmail + Webspace + Web Filter.

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I would like to get exchange into school, but due to costing and budget, that is out the question at the moment

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Exchange is probably over the top for what most schools need. Would a simple Linux based installation suffice with IMAP and SMTP? or do you want the groupware functionality too? If so you can still use Linux. Just use Zimbra or Scalix instead.

I have negotiated with our ISP durhamnet a special price due to the fact we have let them use our site as an external node to the major town nearby.We have a 100Mb feed just for our school to do with what we want for a very reasonable price. normally it would be £17k but it is about one third of that arn't we lucky.

Please no begging letters or requests to tap in hehe!

we need it for film downloads................only for educational purposes you understand :wink:

100MB!!!! Blinking Flopping WOW!!! I wish I had that

We've got 100Mbit to the local POP and 155Mbit out onto the Internet to share with the schools on the RBC network. Pretty soon this is going to increase to load balanced dual 100Mbit connections out onto the Internet :D

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Originally Posted by bossman

I have negotiated with our ISP durhamnet a special price due to the fact we have let them use our site as an external node to the major town nearby.We have a 100Mb feed just for our school to do with what we want for a very reasonable price. normally it would be £17k but it is about one third of that arn't we lucky.

Please no begging letters or requests to tap in hehe!

we need it for film downloads................only for educational purposes you understand :wink:

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Bossman

Do you feel you get your true 100MB as we have 10MB with durham.net and often struggle to get 4MB speeds.

@Sylv3r: originally we thought we had the same problem, but when we had 10Mbit we successfully got the true speed by running simultaneous downloads of large files... try getting 3 ~700MB ISOs from ftp.mirror.ac.uk at once using something like wget on linux (3 separate TTYs) or FileZilla in Windows.

Just found out today that North Yorks have awarded the ISP contract to French IT provider - Bull & there partner Serendipity. It said that it was not the cheapest option from the tendering exersize, so awaits to see how much the new charges are..... comes with some good promises, but we have seen them all before.

EMBC here..... they are truly cack.

Our current connection is a 2MB radio link to EMBC, then a 155MB link from them to the internet (shared with all the schools in the East Midlands who are with them.)

We are shortly getting a 10MB link to EMBC as they are currently in the process of digging up the road to the school for the fibre! In turn EMBC have contacted us to say that they are upgrading their central pipe to a gigabit. Should speed things up and cut out those dropped downloads hopefully.

Lets just say I'm not convinced were getting VFM from our LGfL 100Mbit pipe. Price is in the same ball park as quoted earlier in thread.

Exchange provides the ability to have group calendaring, resource booking, tasklists all integrating virtually seemlessly with MS Office.

Ask a few questions, click a few check boxes, fire and forget.
For more fancy stuff, a bit of vba and Bob's your aunty at the weekends.
Sharepoint integration.

Our admin/support staff love it. Teachers are still only using it for email, but that is likely to change.