Broadband providor?

Currently our broadband is 2Meg fibre supplied from RM :twisted: via the LEA. We currently pay £4750 a year for this service. Its currently doing my head in, if i want a port opening its £300 charge from RM (just for somebody to alter a few lines in a firewall rule! :roll: )

We only have 4 public IP's, everything i want to do the LEA want a 200 page report as to why, i'm ready to scream down the phone at them.

So i've been looking into getting a leased line from somebody else and telling the LEA what to do with there heap of over priced junk from RM.

Anybody here not with RM for their internet link? If so who with, what speed and how much is it costing you? We have ISA Server as a proxy at the moment (i've seen some nice filtering software for ISA Server out there, as i believe this is a requirement for schools to have "filtered" lines)

We were also given an RM Smartcache from the LEA too, but that is about as much use as well i do not know, its just useless.

I'm getting a call from Claranet on monday, and NTL have already quotes £5500 for 2 Meg.

There is an ISP up in our region that provides internet for all (or most of) the schools, DurhamNET, and they're pretty good. I can't believe you're charged for port opening, its ludicrous!

Have a look at Zen Internet and see what you think.

We use Claranet for a 2MB leased line and its something around the £15K a year mark for the one we use, with a super fast SLA, and about 6 IPs, Router, support etc... We just took our Proxy off it and went with Freedom2Surf for just websurfing, and thats amazingly fast for ADSL. We are aware of the 2MB "SDSL" supposed requirement, but as we don't video conference at present, its not an issue, our Mailserver and other external services are still on the leased line, so if and when we get a VLE, and videoconferencing, we will put them on the leased line and just keep the ADSL for web surfing.

£15,000 a year for 2Mbit!? :shock:

Yup, but we were a via.networks customer before so we were probably being cooked for that, until Clara bought them you got exactly what you paid for, but, also we are extrememly rural, and its an old system etc so its probably right for that jobby.

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Have a look at Zen Internet and see what you think.

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I know the boys and girls at Zen quite well (I help out with their gaming stuff, PlayZen). I recommend it to. If I wasn't on super fast cable I'd have DSL with them..

I used to have DSL with them for aobut 2 years, rock solid and decent support (only needed once, nationwide BT outage). I have recently thinking about moving back (after migrating to freedom2surf in November) but now they have imposed capacity limits and at no reduced cost, so... probably not :S

Check out bonded broadband

http://www.nildram.net/pdf/bondedbroadband.pdf
http://www.ukfsn.org/adsl/bonded.html

for the price you pay, you could get a managed 8MB asynchronous service.

We've got 8Mb leased line for about £15000 so i don't understand ISPs who charge 15K for 2Mb!!, really don't.

What i recommend is that you do the research and plan out what you going to use the bandwidth for and what kind of services that various ISPs offer i.e. firewall, filtering, caching etc.

Ashok.

And most of all, ones that don't block ports or charge £300 at time to open them. :)

I feel so inadequate.

We only have a 512kb ADSL line which we pay around £700 for. Unfortunately BT say our line quality is crap so we can't have a 2Mb line, I am waiting for them to come back to us regarding the 1Mb service. There's no cable here and I don't think we'll be able to get a dish installed due to it being a listed building so I am stuck with this low speed.

It isn't that bad really as we have less than 200 machines and my smoothie caches quite alot.

512mb? Not bad for £700! :lol: (I know what you mean ;))

Just because it's listed doesn't mean there aren't alternatives for wireless.. you could easily set up wifi antenna on a flat roof with a few heavy concrete slabs or bricks and bring the cable through a door/window frame for example.

Hi,

We are paying 14k for what is surpose to be a 100MB connection via the LGFL but their proxies only run at 15mb so thats 85% of the service I can use. Today they changed the Firewall settings so that the Video conference I had planedd and trialed on Friday didn't work. The soultion .... a further £600 expenditure for something that was working and the paper work is rediculus... Needless to say it not been a good day.. :x