What speed Internet do you get provided from your LEA

[mattpant]

Hi Guys,

Over the last few months we, at our school have been becoming more and more frustrated by the quality of service being provided to us by the LEA for our Internet connection and speed.

Could you all do me a favor and just post some replys as to what speeds your LEA's are providing you to access the Internet, it would also be useful to know roughly how many pupils/staff that is providing.

I beleive that we are currently on a 2MB link which supports 970 Pupils and 90 Staff the local primary school and the town library!! More and more things are being done online these days (such as our school reporting system/staff cover and soon E-Learning from a central Moodle system)

I do keep telling them that home users can get upto 24MB or more in certain areas for a single user!!!

I just want to gather some info from other schools to see how we fit in the picture and try and fight for better internet access!!!!!

Regards,

Matt

[CyberNerd]

we're due an outdated 8Mb/s connection this year, it will only have to support 1800 users. Hopefully only one person at a time will try and download from our website. If you want to go it alone then look into bonded adsl - several ISP's provide it. (I'm overruled from doing that here, apparently we get a £10k+ p/a grant to pay for a connection, but we must buy it through who the LEA say - backhander or what!)

[_Bat_]

I beleive that we are currently on a 2MB link which supports 970 Pupils and 90 Staff the local primary school and the town library!! More and more things are being done online these days (such as our school reporting system/staff cover and soon E-Learning from a central Moodle system)

Wow. Both my primary schools have a 10mb fibre optic line installed. Thats 10MB for about 300-400 pupils and about 30 staff at a guess.

My old secondary school used to be on a dual ISDN (128kb in total) though for about 700-800 pupils and 60-70 staff. During the lunch hour when everyone was surfing the web, the internet just didn't work. Not even a slow response... there was just no response at all.

[mattpant]

@ _Bat_

God! How lucky are they!! Thats what we should be running at or faster!!!

Regarding your ISDN lines... that is exactly how our Internet has been feeling for the last few weeks!!!!! :-(

[_Bat_]

God! How lucky are they!! Thats what we should be running at or faster!!!

Or... how lucky am I because I am the one who uses it most in both schools lol. It's not uncommon that i'd be the only one surfing the web during at least a part of the day. The ICT Suites are often empty and the only other computers are a teachers laptop in each classroom and one PC in each classroom. In total I have about 115 laptops/pcs between the two schools. That is 20mb between 115 pcs/laptops. How lucky are these schools and myself lol.

[monkey_boy]

We have a 10 meg line. And in fairness, it's very good- I have 10 meg at home and can *never* reap the full benefits because of contention at the exchange and at the ISP. Even so, i don't believe the contention even at peak times amounts to the same reduction in service as 600 people all using the 10 meg uncontended line at our place. Considering the massive push on e-learning and intergrating the web in all its various forms into education, 10 meg is pants.

Having said that, 2 meg is 5 times worse! so i'll stop whinging!! :P

[localzuk]

We used to have a 2mb wireless link which only worked if the wind wasn't blowing. We now have a 10Mb fibre which uplinks to the community college who have a 100Mb fibre - this supports 600 pupils and 50 staff. Seems just right at the moment but I'm guessing it will be slow again in barely any time at all.

[ChrisH]

We have roughly about 3 meg microwave link. It bounces round all the schools in the area. They recently came and fitted a phone line though so maybe they are planning something a little better!!!

[RoyG]

We get 8Mb uncontended via E2BN for 1000 users on around 350 busy machines through our own cacheing server.

Performance is very good, but reliability has been pretty poor - 6 significant breaks in service since New Year.

It does have the BIG advantage of costing the school nothing, but the outages are seriously irritating!! The consortium (including BT, Siemens, RM etc.) supplying the service are getting paid plenty of Government supplied money and really should do better!

RoyG

[RoyG]

We get 8Mb uncontended via E2BN for 1000 users on around 350 busy machines through our own cacheing server.

Performance is very good, but reliability has been pretty poor - 6 significant breaks in service since New Year.

It does have the BIG advantage of costing the school nothing, but the outages are seriously irritating!! The consortium (including BT, Siemens, RM etc.) supplying the service are getting paid plenty of Government supplied money and really should do better!

RoyG

[Geoff]

1 Gigabit Fiber.

[localzuk]

Ah, yes. Reliability is another issue. We have had 2 breaks in service since new year with ours - both of them Somerset County Council's fault IIRC.

Its amazing how upset the teachers get when the net goes down!

[tosca925]

10mb for 1700 users

But it feels liek 1mb most of the time a the service is poor..very poor.

[mattpant]

Thanks guys for your input! It helps to know what other people have when we got o argue some of our points!! Seems like 10MB is the norm for schools these days!

Keep listing them!!! The more info on here the better, hopefully it will help us get a better setup!!!!

[Sylv3r]

Going back to BECTA again as most threads on here do, im sure all secondary schools I think had to have 8MB minimum by 20** Cant remember the exact year. Primary schools were set at 2MB I think.

We have 10MB **Supposedly** here as well.