Internet Connections - What do you have?

Hi guys,

I thought i would ask everyone what sort of Internet connection you have at your work place (Cable, Fibre, ADSL) as we are thinking of changing ours to something a little faster....

Our current service is abysmal at best....... We have a 4mbps ADSL line (because we are on the edge of town, and due to our distance from the local exchange) which feeds the entire network. We had our external support company in the other day to discuss possible alternatives, and according to them, our line was being hammered with a usage of 400%!

Do you guys know of a decent company/ISP that would provide a minimum of a 10 meg connection, fibre or otherwise, at a reasonable price?

The support company in question quoted us at just over £31k a year for a 10 meg fiber...... at which point, the room fell silent.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks in advance

Cheers guys! :)

2x 1Gbps fibre direct to LINX in London.

We have a leased line 8Mb on a 10Mb pipe supplied from BT, costs about £17.5k a year but installation I think was about £7.5K.

Can't fault it, been 100% uptime and has significantly improved the schools use of the Internet. We were in a similar posistion to you having a 2mb ADSL line as we were so far from the exchange and no cable provision.

Nice :)

Cheers for the info guys. Don't suppose you have the contact details for both at all? Or would you suggest going direct?

10MB from the LA for £19k per year ex VAT.

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Originally Posted by binky

2x 1Gbps fibre direct to LINX in London.

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I hate you :(

(edit: hate is a little strong... let's say I'm intensely jealous)

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Our current service is abysmal at best....... We have a 4mbps ADSL line

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To be honest speed isn't everything. Given the choice I would much prefer to have a slower more reliable connection, than a potentially faster, more expensive and unreliable connection.

If you checkout Sam Knows you can search for your exchange and the providers/speeds available. I would look at ADSL2 (if available), or failing this, get a second phone line installed and get broadband on that too, giving you 8Mbps in total. Much cheaper than the £31K I'm sure you'll agree. It makes absolutely no business sense at that price.

We have a farm of 30 old P3 laptops running Windows 98 and a program called proxy+. Each laptop has a mobile broadband connection, ten are on the Vodaphone network, ten are on O2 and we have 5 a piece on Orange and T-Mobile.

We have 30 different VLANs which each use one of the proxies. The advantage of having 30 different connections is that they're never likely to all fail simultaneously. With 500 clients on the network it can be a little bit slow and it's really awkward to filter. Students are not allowed to use the internet unless someone is looking over their shoulder.

We also have 200,000 meg leased line that we use to back up the entire internet daily to a big Amd K6-2 server farm on our colony on the moon. We don't let the kids use that but it's great for gaming out of hours.

lol @ Batman. Thanks. Made me really lol...

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Originally Posted by Michael

To be honest speed isn't everything. Given the choice I would much prefer to have a slower more reliable connection, than a potentially faster, more expensive and unreliable connection.

If you checkout Sam Knows you can search for your exchange and the providers/speeds available. I would look at ADSL2 (if available), or failing this, get a second phone line installed and get broadband on that too, giving you 8Mbps in total. Much cheaper than the £31K I'm sure you'll agree. It makes absolutely no business sense at that price.

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Cheers for the info Michael.

Sorry, i didn't make it entirely clear in my previous post. We are currently on an ADSL2+ connection for our Internet, but still get a max of 4mbps, with an upload of around 668k. We also have 2 other ADSL lines into the academy (one for VPN and the other is a 2 meg learning stream into the ULT WAN) which are also ADSL2+.

The engineer from the support company did suggest splitting the staff and students off on to different Internet connections, but this would involve setting up another ISA server (don't shoot me, it wasn't our choice...!) and a vast amount of tinkering about.

Before we became an academy, i had a dedicated 10mbps cable connection from the local council. Lord knows why ULT cut them off and stuck us with the ADSL....

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Originally Posted by kearton

lol @ Batman. Thanks. Made me really lol...

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My pleasure :D

20Mb Sync connection @ about 16k per year

2 x 512kbps ADSL connections running through a Draytek router for load balancing - shared between about 100 machines, including running an Exchange server :(

I would also speak to Virgin Media or Redstone to see what they could get you too. Are you connected via your RBC? Can they not offer you something better?

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Before we became an academy, i had a dedicated 10mbps cable connection from the local council. Lord knows why ULT cut them off and stuck us with the ADSL....

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That's really strange that your school has taken a backwards step, but as I said above maybe reliability was a factor. I'd rather have a slower, reliable connection than a faster connection which regularly has problems.
I'm also surprised you're on ADSL2. I was under the impression ISPs only put customers on ADSL2 if the phone line was capable of speeds greater than 8Mbps. There isn't that much difference in the two technologies.