Schools Broadband - Plymouth

[bobt]

Any schools in the Plymouth/East Cornwall area using Schools Broadband?

Looking to switch and would like to get some feedback/experiences from others?

 

Thanks in advance

[FN-GM]

We asked for a quote from them for a 200mb line. By the time we had got back to us we had purchased with another supplier and installation had begun.

 

Glad I didn't got with them, how would they handle problems?

[bobt]

We asked for a quote from them for a 200mb line. By the time we had got back to us we had purchased with another supplier and installation had begun.

 

Glad I didn't got with them, how would they handle problems?

 

Who did you end up going with in the end? Any good?

[FN-GM]

Went with Zen Internet. Everything has been excellent. Really good. The service is brill and it was really easy start to finish.

[IrritableTech]

Any schools in the Plymouth/East Cornwall area using Schools Broadband?

Looking to switch and would like to get some feedback/experiences from others?

 

Thanks in advance

We look after about a dozen schools connected to Schools Broadband, but none of them are close to your area I'm afraid. We have a range of ADSL, FTTC and leased line connections depending on what is available to the school. Speed is generally very good. The hosted Lightspeed and Fortinet services work well. There have been a few hiccups in the past, but things seem very stable now. If you want a complete solution provider, they are a good choice I'd say. If you want to pick and choose suppliers and services (like I'm guessing @FN-GM does) then others may be a better bet.

 

Who are you with at the moment and how are you connected? Why do you want to change?

[Marshall_IT]

I'd echo the comments from @IrritableTech above.

They had some issues last year with the amount of new installs and bringing online their hosted filter and firewall solutions.

 

Since then they have invested a lot in their staff and help desk structure as well as updating their equipment in the data centre and most recently migrating to a new data centre to improve peering opportunities by being directly linked with the LINX.

[FN-GM]

My late reply was only a few months ago. But the sales team doesn't necessarily reflect the product they are proving.

[SchoolsBroadband]

My late reply was only a few months ago. But the sales team doesn't necessarily reflect the product they are proving.

 

Hi @FN-GM.

 

I'm really sorry our sales team let you down. That's certainly not normal can you send me a PM with your details please as I'd like to have a chat and find out what went wrong there.

 

Normally we're very quick on quotes and you can always PM me for one if you haven't been in touch with an account manager already.

 

Thanks @IrritableTech and @Marshall_IT. We've just invested a whopping half million pounds in new high end Cisco ASR routers, new POP's, new Interconnects etc and everything is running very nicely.

@bobt let me know if you need any other reference sites as we've plenty over the UK. Feel free to PM me with any questions.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[bobt]

Who are you with at the moment and how are you connected? Why do you want to change?

 

We're with an RBC who serve the South West (won't mention names, opinions are my own not my employers etc.) but they are just awful!

 

a) Their filtering systems are archaic, restrictive and generally poor in comparison to the current offerings on the market

b) Their support is, well, I feel they are arrogant in how they deal with support requests. I often get the feeling that they feel they're so "large" that I'm not worthy of their time. I've often had support representatives laugh off my support requests as if I have no idea what I'm doing, only for it to turn out to actually be what I said it was in the first instance.

c) They claim to be a charity and "working for schools" but their pricing isn't competitive in the slightest despite their so called 0% markup.

d) Any support request such as a port opening can take well over 48 hours to complete. In my previous role, it took them 6 weeks to finally work out what port to open to allow VPN between sites.

e) Recently, there has been several instances of downtime. Regardless of who's fault they claim it was, its still downtime in my opinion.

f) Their sales tactics are "if you leave us, you're opening your kids upto everything on the internet and your network won't be protected" which often spooks schools into never leaving them.

 

I'll stop there as I will just go on and on.

[bobt]

Oh and finally, they use RM and their service provider...