RM Broadband???

[Stardust2014]

Hi

 

A colleague of mine went to the RM Seminar in London this week and mentioned that RM now provide broadband services. Has anybody signed up to this or have any idea what the package involves

 

Thanks

 

Matt

[GeekyPete]

They've offer it for years but they've only really pushed it for LEAs.

 

Quick googling found this RM Education - What we do: RM Broadband

[synaesthesia]

Yeah, we very nearly went with them before plumping for Schools Broadband. Even on a recent renewal tender, they were very difficult to choose between and offered similar filtering services; bearing in mind for a secondary school you'd need to pay extra for smoothwall/lightspeed over and above the costs for the broadband and their supplied safetynet filtering (which really is only suitable for primaries)

[Tallwood_6]

We use RM for broadband, package was reasonably priced and they will supply smoothwall or lightspeed filtering. Downsides are if you use there SMTP feeds they seem to get regular attacks and blacklisting.

IFL change requests can sometimes take an age.

[Chris_]

We use RM for broadband, package was reasonably priced and they will supply smoothwall or lightspeed filtering. Downsides are if you use there SMTP feeds they seem to get regular attacks and blacklisting.

IFL change requests can sometimes take an age.

 

Basically this ^

 

We had a quote from BT and could get double the speed for less than what we were paying RM. I'd also hope that BT would stick to their SLAs..

[plexer]

Before I left the academy we had an RM provided 100mbit connection, I priced up all the alternative providers for the same service and they came in at the best price.

 

Centralized firewall management was one less thing to do, we already had our own smoothwall though.

 

Ben

[elsiegee40]

RM have provided broadband for many years. We got in 2006 complete with SafetyNet filtering... and then, we happily move to faster, cheaper BT in 2011 and a Smoothie box which is far superior at filtering.

 

I really recommend you look elsewhere than RM.

[plexer]

RM have provided broadband for many years. We got in 2006 complete with SafetyNet filtering... and then, we happily move to faster, cheaper BT in 2011 and a Smoothie box which is far superior at filtering.

 

I really recommend you look elsewhere than RM.

 

Wouldn't necessarily say that as we used them for a leased line and they were the best price from the 8 or so providers I had quote, you have to compare the offerings and base your decisions on what's available.

 

Ben

[elsiegee40]

You can only lost from personal experience. Yours was better than mine.

[mats]

We ordered FTTC with RM in June. They contract it out to Talktalk and Openreach who have been a complete shower throughout the process. We still don't have fttc - they have just told us that they can't guarantee a minimum speed of more than 6.5Mb/s which is hopeless. The people at RM are fine - it's the eejits at Talktalk / Openreach who have loused it up at every opportunity. YMMV.

[paulellam]

We have had RM as an ISp for a few years and had a good servicfe from them. Our connection is robust and the filtering works a treat. We can give staff access to Youtube etc with a login which helps. No problems here from RM.

[Arreks]

Friends of mine who work in schools that use RM have mentioned that it feels quite slow compared to other providers, I don't have first hand experience but I've not heard completely positive things about it. I use LGFL here with no problems but it depends on where you're located.

[BassTech]

We're with RM, we find they get blacklisted a lot so Exchange goes mad from time-to-time with bounce-backs. We still have SmartCache 2, moving away very soon as it's out dated tosh.

[sonofsanta]

We were with RM for a while, moved away.

 

I always found it hilarious that to request a DNS change on school.county.sch.uk, an email from said school.county.sch.uk domain wasn't proof of authority to request the change; instead, we had to fax a letter on headed paper. Because, y'know, we keep our headed paper a secret and don't send it out to hundreds of people at a time, but we hand out email addresses like sweets at Halloween.

 

[GeekyPete]

We were with RM up until 2 Years ago when the LEA changed everyone to NGFL (BT lines) and it's been a total Nightmare since....

 

Never relied on safetyNet to be honest, had smartcache but that's long gone and Smoothwall installed now.

 

By comparison RM were streets ahead of NGFL.

[Chris_]

0800 121 8642

[elliot-w]

We've been with RM (SWGFL) down in the southwest for a while now and there is constant service disruptions which is usually to do with the transparent proxy that most schools in my area have. All in all i'd recommend staying away from RM and their internet services as its never been great, average at best. But don't know wether it would be any different for a school/college in another part of the UK but from most the schools near us, 90% of the time they would also give them a bad review.

[simpsonj]

Apologies for raising this thread from the dead, but also looking for opinions on RM Broadband for a secondary school. They don't appear to be getting the same positive reviews as other School ISP's seem to be, but wondered if anything had changed over the past 6 months or so? Would you trust to RM's own filtering, or is a Smoothwall or similar device a necessity? Quote we've received from them is very reasonable priced, but adding an additional web filter would obviously impact the cost substantially...

[SchoolsBroadband]

I believe that with RM you don't get access to change your firewall polices also. you have to go via a support desk to get it done. Where as with us or if you have your own onsite UTM / Firewall then you get full access to change everything.

 

Also with RM's standard filtering AD integration is an additional extra (I believe £350pa although I may be not 100% right on cost but they give it FOC year 1).

 

My view is that both Lightspeed and Smoothwall are far superior products to RM safetynet which is why RM sell them on top of their standard offering if schools want it.

 

Also check out for other things that need to be added onto the package that you may get with other suppliers as standard.

 

If you want a quote from us then please PM me and I'd be happy to oblige

 

Dave

[Steve21]

Apologies for raising this thread from the dead, but also looking for opinions on RM Broadband for a secondary school. They don't appear to be getting the same positive reviews as other School ISP's seem to be, but wondered if anything had changed over the past 6 months or so? Would you trust to RM's own filtering, or is a Smoothwall or similar device a necessity? Quote we've received from them is very reasonable priced, but adding an additional web filter would obviously impact the cost substantially...

 

A lot of the filtering side depends how granular you want it. If it's just the basic "block XYZ" it works fine. But if you're expecting things like 6th Form get this, Staff get that, it needs something else on top. You get access to the filtering side yourself, but as mentioned firewall requests are required.

 

They can have their ups and downs certainly, but then they also include things that others don't like direct links to police etc if required, built in staffproxy etc.

 

They've obviously been pushing a lot of updates recently in regards to Google SSL/fancyness etc which has caused some problems.

 

Steve

[foofighterjim]

We have been with RM for the line since April and have been very happy with the service. We have Smoothwall UTM appliance for the filtering and firewall. Safetynet is good but by no means perfect. It is good to know that we could have other solutions than Smoothwall and not have to worry about purchasing a dedicated Firewall on top.