Why does School Internet (Filtered) cost so much ?

[ReBoot]

I've been looking into reducing the cost of our broadband.

 

We are trialling an unlimited 80/20 Business FTTC service from Spitfire which costs £31 + £10 line rental (this is all on their website).

 

For filtering I have two in house solutions working. Squid with Dansguardian, using the Shalla Backlists, and the Quinto Labs proxy from diladele.com (this does SSL bump and AD integration nicely). Both of these run on HP Microservers, Dansguardian on an N34L with 8GB RAM and Diladele on a Gen 8 with 16GB.

 

Incidentally the base Gen 8 Microserver is available from Ebuyer with cashback for under £150. You can easily build the whole appliance for less than £400.

 

If I get filtered FTTC from my LEA this costs in excess of £3K. As I understand it this uses exactly the same BT Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC) that I get from Spitfire. So we are paying over 2K annually for web filtering - this seems a bit expensive to me but appears to be the industry norm. To a small primary this will be a significant proportion of the ICT budget.

 

Any views on whether we get value for money.

[Norphy]

The main differences will be that with a business class line, there will be an SLA of some description guaranteeing your uptime and service response should it go wrong. In addition, contention will be either none existent or very, very low with your LEA provided line whereas a £30 broadband connection will be shared with everyone else on that circuit.

[synaesthesia]

The majority of primary schools do not have permanent on site technical staff; something you would need with regards to filtering because Dansguardian will need a lot of looking after. It is not a suitable product on it's own. You're backing it up with something else which is good, but you also need to be on hand for zero day problems. It certainly won't cope as soon as the Google SSL thing hits later this month, and you'll have your work cut out sorting that out. There's no failover. The responsibility should something go wrong, or should something slip through that filtering lands on *you*. No SLA.

 

And yes, 2k PA for decent filtering is commonplace. However it's not all about that, as detailed above. Go elsewhere other than your LEA and you'll easily find comparable products for far less than £3k - certainly nearer £2k, including filtering, email provision, education specific support, education specific connectivity and links to educational content, peace of mind, no contention, hardware failures are the responsibility of the ISP and not you. £2k-£3k is a very typical and, for what you get, reasonable figure for broadband provision for a primary school.

 

Your school is not a business, (well, perhaps it is, but for the purposes of this context it is not). Your liability does not stretch to stopping errant staff spending their time on ebay or facebook, far more importantly it goes to child protection and that is far, far beyond the reach of that ISP and too much responsibility for the school alone to shoulder.

Edited January 11, 2015 by synaesthesia

[ReBoot]

On SLAs and contention. Spitfire are a business class ISP who offer exceptional value for money.

 

There is no such thing as uncontended FTTC as everyone is using the same BT product in the access network. Contention, SLAs and fix times are all down to the BT Wholesale product specification. Obviously there may be differences in the core network but the access network is often the critcal component.

 

There are uncontended EFM (Ethernet in the First Mile) products but this is not FTTC and would cost significantly more than 2-3K for a filtered service.

 

I take the points about on-site support and technician availability.

 

For reference here are the BT Wholesale products I refer to.

BT Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC) This is the standard FTTC service costing tens of pounds a month – typically £50/month for business.

 

BT Wholesale Etherway Superfast (GEA) This uses FTTC to the premises and a dedicated Ethernet backhaul circuit and costs hundreds of pounds a month – typically around £200/month.

[synaesthesia]

Indeed true, however I meant to stress that the filtering/child protection is the most important part out of all of that. Are you and your school willing to take on that responsibility? Do you have a procedure in place for when something goes wrong? (that's when, not if).

[localzuk]

Doing it yourself may sound good, but it is putting a heck of a lot of responsibility on your shoulders. Dansguardian is fine, I've used it, but relying on free lists is a huge risk. Also, neother of the 2 solutions you mention appear to have an active adapt/dynamic content filter.

 

Most commercial filtering solutions offer a huge amount of individual control and, in most cases now, application level control (eg. blocking Facebook Messenger, but allowing Facebook Pages etc...).

 

With filtering, it really is a case of "you get what you pay for".

[SchoolsBroadband]

Hi @ReBoot,

 

that's not quite correct. There's also LLU'd FTTC such as EoFTTC (and other carriers variants). It's similar to GEA except you get guaranteed bandwidth over it unlike standard FTTC and a higher SLA. Currently we offer EoFTTC as standard on some of our primary school bundles and this can guarantee speeds of 20mbit up / down so long as the line can support it. if there's spare capacity on our carriers network then it can "boost" over the 20Mbit too which 99% of the time there is.

 

We also get layer 2 hand off so can do full end to end quality of service for specific applications. It's essentially a leased line.

 

For Spitfire at £31month it's highly likely that they will be losing money on a primary school as I know what the average usage is for a primary schools on the 95th percentile and it's more than £31pm in bandwidth over BT WBMC / WBC and that's even before the cost of the FTTC tail.

@synaesthesia also makes some very good points too. But if you're happy doing all support yourself then go for it and good luck

 

Dave

 

 

On SLAs and contention. Spitfire are a business class ISP who offer exceptional value for money.

 

There is no such thing as uncontended FTTC as everyone is using the same BT product in the access network. Contention, SLAs and fix times are all down to the BT Wholesale product specification. Obviously there may be differences in the core network but the access network is often the critcal component.

 

There are uncontended EFM (Ethernet in the First Mile) products but this is not FTTC and would cost significantly more than 2-3K for a filtered service.

 

I take the points about on-site support and technician availability.

 

For reference here are the BT Wholesale products I refer to.

BT Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC) This is the standard FTTC service costing tens of pounds a month – typically £50/month for business.

 

BT Wholesale Etherway Superfast (GEA) This uses FTTC to the premises and a dedicated Ethernet backhaul circuit and costs hundreds of pounds a month – typically around £200/month.

[X-13]

There's also LLU'd FTTC such as EoFTTC (and other carriers variants). It's similar to GEA except you get guaranteed bandwidth over it unlike standard FTTC and a higher SLA. Currently we offer EoFTTC as standard

 

It's almost as if he's trying to communicate with us...

 

I'm going to have to look into this at some point soon... there's talk of us changing ISP.

[SchoolsBroadband]

lol sorry sales pitch over...

 

But I see the future where schools need guaranteed bandwidth.

 

It's been quite interesting over the past few years as schools have gone from leased lines to ADSL, then FTTC and I see them going back to leased lines again as more and more applications go into the cloud and leased line prices get cheaper and cheaper. Bandwidth usage goes up year and year, particularly when you throw in 1:1 ipad deployment.

 

oh and pm'd ;-)

 

Dave

[Edu-IT]

lol sorry sales pitch over...

 

But I see the future where schools need guaranteed bandwidth.

 

It's been quite interesting over the past few years as schools have gone from leased lines to ADSL, then FTTC and I see them going back to leased lines again as more and more applications go into the cloud and leased line prices get cheaper and cheaper. Bandwidth usage goes up year and year, particularly when you throw in 1:1 ipad deployment.

 

oh and pm'd ;-)

 

Dave

Using your service, as an example, can schools continue to use onsite Lightspeed appliances if they have invested in their own equipment already?

[SchoolsBroadband]

Using your service, as an example, can schools continue to use onsite Lightspeed appliances if they have invested in their own equipment already?

 

Yes they can if they want to but the licence costs to Lightspeed will be more expensive than the ones included in our package due to our bulk buying with Lightspeed. Also our Lightspeed servers are in resilient clusters so you get the advantage of that too.

 

Ta

 

Dave

[snagrat]

Yes they can if they want to but the licence costs to Lightspeed will be more expensive than the ones included in our package due to our bulk buying with Lightspeed. Also our Lightspeed servers are in resilient clusters so you get the advantage of that too.

 

Ta

 

Dave

 

But you do lose some features with not having it onsite don't you?

[ReBoot]

At the end of the day it will be the SMT and Governors who make the call on this - I can only provide them with the available options and advise on relative strengths weaknesses.

 

At the moment I have the LEA and home grown solutions both available for comparison on our network.

Performance on the Spitfire connection is very good - having the caching proxy local rather than remote is a definite advantage.

 

We have had one incident so far and this was common to both filters (LEA and home grown)

 

Since we have taken responsibility for our own filtering there is better staff awareness and more vigilance monitoring internet useage. The tendency is to forget it when someone esle looks after it for you.

 

No perfect solution but the 2.5K annual saving we could make has the potential to make a big difference to our ICT provision. Broadband is one of the the biggest single components of the ICT budget.

[synaesthesia]

It's also the biggest single failing point for multiple reasons as already said. If any one of my schools said they'd go with a home grown setup, I'd put my recommendations to them in writing and then leave. After all, what would they say to the press when something goes wrong.

[SchoolsBroadband]

But you do lose some features with not having it onsite don't you?

 

There are some minor differences between a hosted and onsite installation but our customers find its not detrimental to protecting their users and using the system. If it was then we wouldn't do it

[Patrick]

It's also the biggest single failing point for multiple reasons as already said. If any one of my schools said they'd go with a home grown setup, I'd put my recommendations to them in writing and then leave. After all, what would they say to the press when something goes wrong.

 

I agree with you. I'm in a primary setup using BTLS Lightspeed and i couldn't even imagine going homegrown.