SLT want faster broadband

[Sonic007]

So SLT would like faster broadband and keep moaning it’s too slow.

No surprise there as all teachers are trying to do zoom calls and stream etc.

 

We are currently with RM on fibre to the cabinet which gives us upto 80mbps But we get no where near.

 

 

We are restricted to 25Mbps download and 5Mbps Upload speeds.

 

Business manager mentioned looking at EXA networks but from what I hear they aren’t great.

 

Anyone recommend anything? Leased line?

There is no FTTP availability in the area.

 

Fixed fibre leased line been quoted £17000!

 

What’s my options.

 

Thanks all.

[Boredguy]

if your already on FTTC, then your next step will likely be either a pair of FTTC connections or a leased fibre connection.

 

We pay less than £10k for a 300mb on a 1Gb fibre per year (managed service including web filtering) but it depends where your located, what your exchange will handle and the provider.

[Michael]

Your only viable solution is a fibre lease line. Once it's installed, you can increase the speed based on need and the school's ability to pay.

 

You also have to consider what a school would be like without any broadband at all. Lease lines are backed up with excellent SLAs.

 

Based on your numbers, a 30/30 or 50/50 connection will feel considerably faster than 25/5.

Edited September 21, 2020 by Michael

[MatthewL]

Why if your line restricted to 25Mbps?

[SchoolsBroadband]

Hi @Sonic007,

 

there's a few things you can do to improve speeds.

 

1. take 2 x FTTC connections and use load balancing / SD-WAN from an onsite device. This will effectively double your speed

2. Check for FTTP (do send me your school details and i'll check for you). Please note you may be able to access a DFE grant to get FTTP installed free of charge. We've taken orders from over 50 schools around the country with installs fee's of up to £50,000 paid for by the DFE

3. Use an altnet such as Gigaclear or Virgin Media (we can use them and many others)

4. Use a leased line (£17,000 is a lot to install). We can check and see what the indicated install costs (known as ECC's) will be by doing a desktop survey and interfacing with BT Openreachs systems.

5. Look at a 4G / 5G solution. This can be done on its own or in conjunction with load balancing / SD-WAN (we have an unlimited filtered / firewalled 4G solution)

 

Do send me a PM if you'd like me to look into it for you.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

 

 

So SLT would like faster broadband and keep moaning it’s too slow.

No surprise there as all teachers are trying to do zoom calls and stream etc.

 

We are currently with RM on fibre to the cabinet which gives us upto 80mbps But we get no where near.

 

 

We are restricted to 25Mbps download and 5Mbps Upload speeds.

 

Business manager mentioned looking at EXA networks but from what I hear they aren’t great.

 

Anyone recommend anything? Leased line?

There is no FTTP availability in the area.

 

Fixed fibre leased line been quoted £17000!

 

What’s my options.

 

Thanks all.

[Sonic007]

Why if your line restricted to 25Mbps?

 

Distance from the exchange apparently.

[Shadow_Walker]

So SLT would like faster broadband and keep moaning it’s too slow.

No surprise there as all teachers are trying to do zoom calls and stream etc.

 

We are currently with RM on fibre to the cabinet which gives us upto 80mbps But we get no where near.

 

 

We are restricted to 25Mbps download and 5Mbps Upload speeds.

 

Business manager mentioned looking at EXA networks but from what I hear they aren’t great.

 

Anyone recommend anything? Leased line?

There is no FTTP availability in the area.

 

Fixed fibre leased line been quoted £17000!

 

What’s my options.

 

Thanks all.

 

EXA are brilliant, moved most of our schools in our trust over to them and have been brilliant at every step.

[ITGURU]

We've always been fortunate - our schools have had the same FTTP leased line connection into the schools in the trust for last 16 years at least (since I started there). For 100mb 1:1 contention symmetrical with pay zero cost for the connection as is funded by the LCC.

Other schools on a 200mb fttp connection only costs us 500 per year. Depending on what county you are in, see if there are any local cheaper options before you start going independent and costing a fortune.

One of our schools were independent with RM broadband at £9200 a year! switching them back to LEA funded, it costs them £500 a year after an approx £3200 install charge!.

[paulkerton]

Get a leased line fibre directly to the premises and get rid of the copper cabling. It's 2020. My 5G phone can do better than FTTC, through concrete walls.

[mavhc]

https://www.cerberusnetworks.co.uk/connectivity-broadband/fibre-demand have a form that lets you see what's available from Openreach at your location, and email you an update every so often with updated info. One day my FTTP will come.

[supportman]

Fiber to the cabinet is a contended service as well do goes up and down with speed depending on usage. Leased line is uncontended usually so totally different ballgame.

 

I'd pay the 17k personally! We pay 12k for 500mbit. The internet is at the heart of anything we do. Its worth it.

Edited September 22, 2020 by supportman

[forkies]

£7K for 1Gb/1GB with Southern Comms, over an Openreach circuit. Definitely worth going up, we used to be on a 20MB LEA circuit, before going 100MB then 300MB and finally 1GB

[Meldrew]

FTTP on demand. You have to pay the build costs, but so far ours has been less than 5k. We've just had 330Mb installed. The monthly cost is peanuts for the speed - meaning you make savings that make up for the initial build costs really quickly.

[mavhc]

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/09/openreach-confirm-67-uk-areas-for-next-fttp-broadband-rollout.html

 

and

 

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/06/openreach-tweak-fttp-on-demand-pricing-and-adds-new-speeds.html should be useful

 

map here

 

https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband/fibre-first#fibrefirstlocations

[woreilly]

We use CoConnect across our MAC. All sites have 100mbps openreach leased lines (on gigabit bearers) along with Smoothwall web filtering. Shayne ([email protected]) will happily discuss options with you with a view to providing a quote.

[Wave9_Lee]

So SLT would like faster broadband and keep moaning it’s too slow.

No surprise there as all teachers are trying to do zoom calls and stream etc.

 

We are currently with RM on fibre to the cabinet which gives us upto 80mbps But we get no where near.

 

 

We are restricted to 25Mbps download and 5Mbps Upload speeds.

 

Business manager mentioned looking at EXA networks but from what I hear they aren’t great.

 

Anyone recommend anything? Leased line?

There is no FTTP availability in the area.

 

Fixed fibre leased line been quoted £17000!

 

What’s my options.

 

Thanks all.

 

We'd be happy to provide some priced options if you'd like. As mentioned, you have a few options;

 

2 x FttC (cheapest, adds some resilience) Contended (EoFttC variant is uncontended, slightly more expensive)

FttP - (i.e. Superfast) up to Gbps, contended, in very few areas, not symmetrical - usually contended - possible high install costs, some subsidy programs are available.

Leased Line - best SLA, symmetrical - up to 1Gbps (sensibly) - getting cheaper all the time..

 

Cheers

[leegcvcc]

BT leased line (just upgraded from 200/500mb to 1gb/1gb) after moving from the LEA provision. Not had an outage in 5 years nearly with BT leased (where's that wood!) so best <£9k I spend each year. Obviously i now managed firewalls etc, but it's far better and quicker for changes anyway.

[Jamman960]

If you're needing it quickly load balancing more FTTC connections is probably your only option, it took 9 months for Openreach to sort out our leased line, assuming your quote is so high due to distance/complexity I suspect it could be even longer.

 

James

[EXA_Mark]

So SLT would like faster broadband and keep moaning it’s too slow.

 

 

Business manager mentioned looking at EXA networks but from what I hear they aren’t great.

 

 

Thanks all.

 

Hi,

 

You are right we are not great. We are awesome

 

Seriously though I do not know who has said what, and that is not for me to say their opinion is wrong, even if it is.

 

We take what we do very seriously, and have done since we started supplying schools with connectivity and filtering 17 years ago. There are plenty of people on here (and thanks to those who have said so in this thread) that like what we do, and our customer retention rate of over 95% would seem to back that up.

 

Utlimately, do we have issues from time to time. Sure. In fact every provider on here has threads (some many more than others) on their outages or issues. But if we do have them, we try and make sure we communicate, and learn from them if we do.

 

At present we are one of the largest non-grid for learning ISPs in the UK, and serve thousands of customers for connectivity and filtering and thousands more for our Exa Foundation. We have been very fortunate to win many awards (not the sort you sponsor and get one), including ISPA (our equivalent of BAFTA) for Best Business ISP, Best Customer Service and Best Broadband multiple times. In fact we have had over 60 finalist nominations in 16 years from ISPA. And we are shortlisted for Five next month, including Best Business ISP.

 

As an aside to that we also write our own software in house, such as SurfProtect, so we tend to be amongst the very first in the world to fix problems such as Google or Captcha updates, as we are not waiting for update patches to push across consumer equipment in the same way or for third parties to write fixes, we do it ourselves. And our ExaBGP service is used by many of the worlds largest tech companies, including Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, BT and the BBC.

 

So are we perfect? No, but we are having a bloody good go at getting there.

 

Let us put you in touch with ANY of our customers (not just testimonial ones) or others that have moved from competitors you are considering, and let them speak for us. Hope you give us a go.

Edited October 21, 2020 by EXA_Mark

[paulellam]

We have the same issue, a few years ago BT wanted 15k to get a fibre to the school, and they still show as no availability in the near future, and we are in a city!

[Steve21]

Out of curiosity, what is the rough pricing nowadays for 1Gbps lines?

 

My new place I've taken over has a locked in contract till March, but currently they're paying a staggering amount for 300mb (over 10k... yep seriously)

 

Many thanks,

Steve

[Wubbalubbadub]

Out of curiosity, what is the rough pricing nowadays for 1Gbps lines?

 

My new place I've taken over has a locked in contract till March, but currently they're paying a staggering amount for 300mb (over 10k... yep seriously)

 

Many thanks,

Steve

I pay around 10K for a 1GB/1GB leased line and a managed firewall and filter.

 

Schools Broadband

Edited October 21, 2020 by Wubbalubbadub

[Jonah]

We’ve recently been quoted between £5k and £6k (but some suppliers much higher!) for wires only 1GB/1GB

[Guest Guest]

Your lucky it's only til March, we're paying £9,000 for 200Mbps and we're stuck with it for another 2 years

Out of curiosity, what is the rough pricing nowadays for 1Gbps lines?

 

My new place I've taken over has a locked in contract till March, but currently they're paying a staggering amount for 300mb (over 10k... yep seriously)

 

Many thanks,

Steve

[jnfarmer]

We have two sites and we're looking at a provider who will give us a 1Gb/1Gb at our main site, 100Mb/1Gb at our second site, connected by L3 MPLS with VRF and hosted Netsweeper filtering and Fortigate firewall in their core. Giving us the best of both worlds with a managed service & the ability to have control over our MIPs & SNATs and web filtering content, for £17K a year.