Searching new Broadband Providers

[Chuckster]

The school's Business Director wants me to look at alternative broadband providers as opposed to the service provided by the LA.

 

What the BD wants his the same level of service and provisions offered through the LA service. From the top of my head the things I can think of for now is:

 

• 100Mbps
  
• Filtering
  
• Firewall
  
• VPN
  
• Good customer service
  
• Reasonable SLA
  

 

Are there any recommended companies that provide broadband connection for schools? The only one I can think of thus far is RM.

[mikeyw]

We currently use Schools Broadband, Any issues we have had they have helped us out, They meet all your needs.

[Mark182]

@SchoolsBroadband and these

[SchoolsBroadband]

thanks @Mark182 and @mikeyw

@Chuckster we do all you require and more. I'll send you a PM

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[beancole]

I used to be a reseller. I wouldn't go for an external provider. if you do look into it I know people at KCOM and they are very very good.

[mats]

We bought FTTC through RM. Only took about 6 months from order to completed - mostly due to Talktalk and Openreach having a complete inability to communicate or honour appointments. And the telcos don't understand the difference between "minimum" and "maximum".

[Baerf]

We use BT. Not sure (the name escapes me at the moment) what the product is called, but it allows us to drop the bandwidth from 200MB to 50MB (50MB is what we set it to, but it could be as little as 1MB. They do have a restriction of the 4 week change period though) over the Summer break and get the cost savings. It's been 100% reliable and they have given us a 4 hour SLA (fix) no matter how the break occurs. Plus we get the full 200MB as well.

 

Obviously different needs and budget, but i would never be happy having the filtering, VPN and firewall being carried out by a 3rd party. The filtering is for YOUR pupils safety, the VPN is for YOUR staff's secure access and the firewall is to protect YOUR data and systems. A third party (no matter what they say) will never give the same importance and flexibily to these requirements than the in house department.

 

B

Edited December 12, 2014 by Baerf

[MattGibson]

Exa-Networks! - support & firewall changes instant!

[Gardinho]

+1 for EXA Networks. Top class compared to old LA provider.

[rob_coles]

+1 for exa. We had a few install issues on our end they went above and beyond to help us.

 

They also went well the extra mile when we went on to sips.

[fairm010]

+1 for Exa. Been using them since April and absolutely faultless.

[snagrat]

+12 for School's Broadband.

 

Move 12 schools to them in last 6 months and been great.

[Edu-IT]

Anyone using SB for their telephony?

[snagrat]

Anyone using SB for their telephony?

 

Not yet but looking into their SIP offering for one school.

 

Also interested in anyone else is currently using them?

[nathan]

Not yet but looking into their SIP offering for one school.

 

Also interested in anyone else is currently using them?

 

I've been looking into the SIP offerings for our trust of schools. Also looked at SIP trunks from spitfire.co.uk. £6 per channel and each includes 5000 minutes to UK local/National landlines. Various free and stable PBX's out there too that don't require a beefy server. I've been looking into the idea of centrally hosting the PBX and having the handsets in each school connect to it.

[MattGibson]

I've been looking into the SIP offerings for our trust of schools. Also looked at SIP trunks from spitfire.co.uk. £6 per channel and each includes 5000 minutes to UK local/National landlines. Various free and stable PBX's out there too that don't require a beefy server. I've been looking into the idea of centrally hosting the PBX and having the handsets in each school connect to it.

 

Sorry if this is going off the original topic Nathan we are also looking into this for our trust, I'd be interested to know what PBX's you have been looking at and wether it's cloud based or hosted in house.

[SchoolsBroadband]

The important thing for any real time end to end service is can your isp guarantee end to end bandwidth over its network to the sip server or hosted pbx

 

If not then be very careful as you could create yourself a whole world of pain. I don't mean doing a bit of qos on the perimeter firewall either. True network level qos / bandwidth guarantee is the proper way to do it.

 

We for example create a completely separate vlan for voice and prioritise this over any other traffic at a network level all the way back to our sip severs / hosted platform.

 

Ta Dave

Edited December 17, 2014 by SchoolsBroadband

[Baerf]

I've been looking into the SIP offerings for our trust of schools. Also looked at SIP trunks from spitfire.co.uk. £6 per channel and each includes 5000 minutes to UK local/National landlines. Various free and stable PBX's out there too that don't require a beefy server. I've been looking into the idea of centrally hosting the PBX and having the handsets in each school connect to it.

 

We've decided to go direct with BT as they also do our internet line. They offer free calls national (fixed and mobile) and international (just fixed, not mobile) and a 4 hour SLA on a fix should a gas / water etc company dig through our cable, they "say" that they guarentee 100% uptime on the SIP offering as well... but that's yet to be seen. Pricing wise it's comparable to our current fixed line offerings and as per their flex internet offering, we can just up the number of channels we need or down the number of channels within a 24 hour turn around, so for example over the summer break we drop the number of channels and then up them again during term time.

 

Works well.

 

B