Exa Networks

[gmonks]

Hi,

 

We're looking into getting new Broadband here, and have had a quote from Exa Networks.

 

Anybody had any bad experiences?

 

 

They seemed quite good when they came in and I like the features they offer. Interested in how people find their filtering too.

 

Would be interested to know if you've had any issues / problems with them.

 

Thanks in advance,

 

George

[fairm010]

I use Exa here, along with their Surfprotect offering. Great service, not had one downtime in the year weve been running with it. Also, their support are very quick and friendly!

[chippo]

Been with EXA for 3 years now, top service no issues. Just announced 1 gig connections.

[EXA_Mark]

Hi,

 

We're looking into getting new Broadband here, and have had a quote from Exa Networks.

 

Anybody had any bad experiences?

 

 

They seemed quite good when they came in and I like the features they offer. Interested in how people find their filtering too.

 

Would be interested to know if you've had any issues / problems with them.

 

Thanks in advance,

 

George

 

Hi George,

 

Hopefully you have managed to speak with or PM a few other edugeek users about our services, but if you still want to speak with more schools just PM me, let me know the size of your school and I'll put you in touch with some schools of a similar size.

 

You are welcome to speak with any of our schools, we don't just have a few testimonial/case study ones so I can let you have more or less as many as you want.

[rob_coles]

Been using exa for 2 years now.

 

Connection has been faultless support when we've needed it has been really good.

[jonnykewell1]

I've sent numerous emails recently but they are taking an age to reply. Trying to get the VPN working in one of our primary schools but won't login. Can anyone on here PM with assistance?

[EXA_Mark]

I've sent numerous emails recently but they are taking an age to reply. Trying to get the VPN working in one of our primary schools but won't login. Can anyone on here PM with assistance?

 

Hi @jonnykewell1

 

I've sent you a PM, if you can come back to me I'll get someone to give you a call directly. We have no delay in support email queue at this time so not quite sure what is holding up an response. As is always the case, if you need help urgently always ring us on 0345 1451234 and you'll be able to speak to our support team straight away.

 

- - - Updated - - -

[box_l]

We have found them to be excellent for both the connection and the support, and we use them for approx. 30 schools in Herefordshire.

 

Surfprotect is very easy to use too.

 

BoX

[jonnykewell1]

All sorted now Mark. Thanks for the swift response. Pass on my thanks to lewis.

[blueplanetit]

Exa is expensive especially when you see the wholesale prices for the products they resell, there are much more cost effective ISP's and their are some really good web filtering solutions out there, we saved about £7000 over 3 years for three rural primary schools going away from Exa, the broadband and web filtering solution has been in for 2 years now and was recently adapted to bring it into compliance with the new Safeguarding requirements.

[EXA_Mark]

Obviously expensive is a relative term blueplanetit

 

If you compare our prices to other education providers, Grid for Learnings or Local Authorities we are more often than not significantly cheaper. If you compare us to a home user focused ISP (such as Plus Net or such) then our prices are more expensive.

 

However bear in mind what you get with a connection from Exa.

 

A outstanding quality connection. Support from highly experienced engineers and technical support. SurfProtect content filtering is included (of which version 3 launched today) with significant advantages over "free" service and access to the Exa Foundations events and training (of which we have now run hundreds of events in the past year since launch) Exa.Foundation all of which are included in our standard connection annual fee, oh and did I mention our standard contracts are still only one year.

 

So if you compare this, and far from being expensive I'd say it was outstanding value for money, but then again I am slightly biased on this and bear in mind our average primary school pays less than £2,500 a year for all this.

 

However if a school has someone who can provide them all these services or advice, can use good opensource software and are happy to use a (primarily) residential based service then yes they will be able to save money compared to us or ANY education focused providers.

 

Also, just to clarify something, Exa is an ISP we don't resell anyone! Yes for some services (such as FTTC for example) we connect into the Openreach Exchange networks via BT Wholesale (which is how virtally ALL ISP's connect into the nearly 6000 telephone exchanges in the UK), but we are not reselling a third parties ISP services (such as BT's). Those wholesale networks connect in turn back to us as an ISP and all connectivity is routed out directly from us via our PoPs/Datacentre. Exa is not a VISP.

We also have other services, such as our DarkLight service (Dark Fibre) were we do not touch Openreachs network and provide direct point to point (customer direct to Exa not via exchange or Cabinet) fibre connections.

[DJ-1701]

Support from highly experienced engineers and technical support.

 

Certainly agree with that statement.

Have to call up or e-mail once in a while to add an exception for NetASQ (an optional extra for https and user based filtering), always very helpful staff.

 

I've kept a record of the sites that needed to be bypassed for https filtering, just in case anyone else had issues.

Sites requiring bypass to SSL Interception - Blogs - EduGeek.net

[blueplanetit]

I know often you get what you pay for and purely as a product I have no gripes with Exa but on the costings people can do better without drops in speed or support. What flagged this to me was the excessive commission I was offered by an Exa salesperson to sell in Exa products when I was acting in an advisory role, schools provide a vital role in our community and I know companies cannot provide their services for nothing but the margins are too high. There is a real cost to our children and their learning opportunities when companies charge more than is necessary, in the example I mentioned those schools were able to provide almost a whole class of new laptops to the children with the money they saved by switching from Exa. Their internet and filtering have been in place for a number of years without issue and without onsite expertise. Without the saving they would have not have been able to fund the new laptops, for me that makes it too expensive.

[localzuk]

Having just signed up for connections for 6 schools, I can say that this isn't our experience. Sure, Exa weren't the cheapest, but out of 5 companies I asked for quotes, Exa was the second cheapest.

 

I've been pretty happy so far too. Any issues I've had have been resolved within a very short period of time.

[blueplanetit]

it was a 50/50 split between rural and town on FTTC

[EXA_Mark]

Whilst I appreciate some of the sentiment, I can't say I fully agree (not a big surprise I am sure).

 

I believe passionately, as you appear to do, that the schools play a vital role in the future of our country and that is why The Exa Foundation was created to help schools get expert guidance and training, where they no longer have budgets for dedicated training on things such as E-Safety or Computing Curriculum. We do not make a single penny profit from it at all, in fact quite the opposite it costs us a large amount of money to staff and run.

 

On the "Excessive Commission". Exa has always run a partner program (as you know) since we were formed 13 + years ago and this is clearly shown on our website (nothing hidden), and the partners do, as we and they openly talk about, get a reduced charge on our services (not commission as such) for this.

 

The partners then provide our services to their customers (Schools and Businesses) at our standard RRP (the same exact price we sell at). Schools do not pay any more (and sometime less) through our partners than they would do coming to us directly. The partners then arrange the migration to our services, manage things such as content filtering or email and provide on-going support for the services. Which I personally think is pretty good value for the schools, who as I said are paying NO more through a partner than they are directly.

 

We set our price structure in place when we formed the company, and I can state categorically that our prices for connectivity have never once increased, not even by inflation. In fact at the other end of the scale, our leased line prices have come down significantly as the market has and continues to change. When you then consider all the extra value the schools get, without having to buy other services from us, then we really do believe that our prices are great value.

 

Getting extra resources in schools such as Laptops are great, and important, but having really reliable internet, support as and when you need it, and filtering that is ahead of the curve, all of which enable schools to get on with what is the most important thing, teaching, are just as important in my humble opinion. The training that they can then get through the Foundation, in person (at the schools, at no charge) or via online MOOCS courses.exa.foundation larger multi school events (the largest we put on so far had over 150 schools attend) or the summer camps we put on, all of which for Exa schools are completely free of charge, and are even available to non Exa schools (often free too). Let's face it really good training and coaching is not cheap these days, and the benefits our schools get from this really cannot be over exaggerated, as they will tell you themselves.

 

You are welcome to follow exafoundation on Twitter to see what we have coming up in Banbury and the wider Oxfordshire/Northamptonshire areas, maybe go along and see for yourself what a difference it makes, and why we do this.

 

There are of course always going to be cheaper options than Exa, and there will always be more expensive options I am sure. There are several large well known companies (talked about on Edugeek regularly) who pay their shareholders or directors Hundreds of Thousands of £'s a year and claim to not be for profit, and then there are other companies who run a significant losses to try and capture market share, hoping they don't go under in the process. We find that the mid ground of charging just the right amount and delivering great value is a better option than either of the extremes.

 

Ultimately like many things, you get what you pay for, sometimes cheaper can be just as good, most often you end up sacrificing something somewhere.

[blueplanetit]

I think all the extra stuff is good but if you just need a business class, high speed internet link with web filtering you could look at cutting the costs that go into running the foundation and the courses to deliver a saving for those schools who's budget is really pressed??? Sort of a no frills, just the core functionality and performance.

[EXA_Mark]

I agree there are lots of education based companies who push "frills" on schools and provide curated libraries of material or "unique" access to certain highly beneficial content, or tie them into longer term contracts, and there are those who try and sell or retain customers via fear (as you mentioned in another post); and those sort of frill services I do agree are not really required these days as access to most of them is very easy to obtain elsewhere, and these are companies charging three to four times what Exa charge, that is excessive. I don't see us doing a high class education internet connection with completely in-house developed and coded education centric filtering (not just generic) and offering our Foundation side as "frills"

 

There are of course lots of things we could do to lower our prices such as:

- Outsource support to overseas or third party provider and not have as many in house highly skilled and experienced engineers.

- Run a highly congested residential focused network that you resell many hundreds of times above capacity.

- Tell customers to use a free general URL filtering system and let the schools figure it out for themselves.

- Heck we could just resell another residential ISP's service, pretend it is our own and sell it for £5 a month, that would only cost the schools £60 a year and they could buy even more Laptops with the money they would save

 

Of course the reality is Exa are not going to do any of those things! We have built up an outstanding reputation and a large customer basis because we deliver great value, support and have a sustainable business model which lets us keep our pricing stable, whilst continuing to innovate in e-safety and training and provide new and faster services. I would like to point out again, our prices were exactly the same before launched the foundation, and they are exactly the same price if you do not take our filtering; the are value add. We didn't increase them and then give away "free" things, the prices are exactly as before and now you get this too. We do not see the Foundation as a "frills" service at all, in fact quite the contrary, getting our young educated and enthused about computer programming is critical to the future of this country and understanding the vital aspects of e-safety as essential as anything else in the protection of the young and vulnerable.

 

There are ISPs and VISP out there who sell services at a HUGE loss to get market share, and then they are others who cram the network full to oversell and make more money but deliver, in my opinion, far inferior services.

 

Absolutely, we would save money if we did not do either the Foundation or SurfProtect, but we believe the value for schools is worth far more, and adds to our offering. However the fact is that the money that we invest in the Foundation and SurfProtect, whilst very sizeable (and would add to our bottom line substantially) if you then divide that by our total customer base you would be looking at reducing costs (as a direct correlation of total £ number invested each year / total customer number ) by a REALLY insignificant amount each year.

 

I am sure, looking at it from the other way round, it is the same for Blue Planet IT and the "free" advisory you give schools. We all know that this still takes your time and all time has a cost, hidden or otherwise, and if you didn't do that for free and spent that time doing other things could you sell your services cheaper too? In fact is that really different to us doing the Foundation and not charging for it?

 

Let's face it, you are reselling or recommending a competing service, with your own filtering(?) and your IT support service which I assume you do charge for, and you don't do everything for free and I would hope you make a profit (it is not an ugly word) for doing what you do. Could you do any of it cheaper and save your customers money? Probably. Should you, who knows, as I do not know your overheads!

 

Obviously Blue Planet IT and Exa come at this from different sides and I can only really speak from our side of being a provider to thousands of schools (and businesses). We are an ISP and software development house first and foremost with a long history in this sector and we really do believe that what we offer is right for schools (and businesses), and ultimately they will chose themselves whether they want a service from an ISP whose background is in the education and business side or whether they want to save money and go down a standard business class ISP or home user provider such as Sky or Talk Talk.

 

Probably nothing more to add to this, and I am conscious of the length of my response on this thread already, so I will leave it there. Sorry to everyone else for the length of this too.

[blueplanetit]

Hi Mark, thanks for the response. I think I am pretty clear on your position and justification of the costs, please forgive the comment on "frills", I suppose what I was saying that it would be good to give schools a choice what they pay for and if they can only afford a high speed, business class internet connection with web filtering then a product that covers these costs with a reasonable mark up would definitely be attractive to them, this would allow them to spend their budget on their specific needs be it safeguarding or coding etc. Just a small comment on where I come from, in a former life I ran the IT Operations for a large FTSE 100 company with an education division for 1000's of users across a number of sites so I know the costs of infrastructure and running an IT helpdesk in the UK so it's not from a position of ignorance in these matters that I make my comments but again thank you for so clearly laying out EXA Networks offering. Edited September 2, 2016 by blueplanetit

[tom_newton]

I guess schools do have a choice - Exa, or one of the myriad "no frills" ISPs and a "a-la-carte" approach, which is far from unusual. I'd count Exa's offering as an expansion of choice, rather than a contraction.

[jonbd]

Have to say i'm having a terrible time trying to get a response from Exa about a problem that their Surfprotect upgrade seems to have caused, and with the kids due back in on Monday it's going to cause me real grief. Support response seems to have been getting slower and slower for us in recent months, and this latest time is incredibly frustrating

[EXA_Mark]

Hi jonbd

 

I have pm'd you for your contact information, but the rest of your post I want to answer here, hope you don't mind.

 

As I am sure you can appreciate software development is never simple. The new SurfProtect (and it is a entirely new from the first line of code, not just an upgrade) is our third complete version of the product and has been in development for around three years. The new version has a massive amount of new features, with a lot more coming over the next few months, but the new core product is now in place and live, as you are aware.

 

The problem with any software development is in the mass deployment of it and as much as you can test in labs and beta wider afield, the reality is you will occasionally/always find bugs with something once it is in the "wild". And of course the internet is essentially a living breathing organism that is constantly evolving and unannounced changes from companies such as Google/YouTube for instance, where providers don't get any notification of changes, or even what has been done, have to then figure this out and adapt the systems to in real time to make sure everything is working as it should be.

 

We are fortunate in the SurfProtect is our own product, coded from scratch entirely in house by our own engineers and developers (not outsourced in any way or part) and we don't have to wait for third party firmware upgrades when problems do arise (and anyone who says they never have problems with software development has never actually developed software. There is a reason Microsoft and Apple constantly release patches.

 

Having said that anyone who has experienced any inconvenience at all is deeply regrettable and our engineers will always do their absolute best to resolve the problems quickly when identified.

 

Can I promise you that you would never have an issue ever again, of course not, that would be an outright lie, but we always try and get things right first time. Then again no one should ever promised that their software or hardware will never have a problem.

 

As for no one coming back to you quickly, my sincere apologies we aim to deal with all calls first time when you call and to get back to all emails quickly.

 

We have a large in house support department that most of the year has spare capacity, but there are several times of year, in particular the week before and actual first week of term after the summer holidays when we always see demand much higher after everyone comes back and need support for lots of different reasons (firewall changes for network updates done over summer and filtering changes are very common). The problem is you cannot employ even more highly experienced and trained technicians for just a couple of weeks at a time, so crunches happen for all companies occasionally, our included.

 

You will see this come back to normal very quickly and once again my apologies if we have not been up to our normal very high level of response.

[jonbd]

Just wanted to say a massive thanks to Mark for messaging me, and for sorting out our problem so fast (and on a weekend no less!) I can sleep easy knowing that I won't have a load of angry teachers berating me on Monday morning!

[round2it]

I am interested in using exa for our broadband the only questions I have is the surf protect. Is it any good and how does it work with ad intergration. Anyone like to share real life experiences of the filtering.

[IrritableTech]

I am interested in using exa for our broadband the only questions I have is the surf protect. Is it any good and how does it work with ad intergration. Anyone like to share real life experiences of the filtering.

 

It's an interesting time to ask that question. Surf Protect has just been upgraded to version 3 - a fully rebuilt product. I haven't used it in anger but the hour I spent sat down with the head developer was extremely interesting. I think Exa will admit that version 2 was in desperate need of replacement and version 3 answers a lot of the short comings of the old product.

 

Be a bit careful with feedback you get over the next few weeks - the product has changed considerably and it might take users a little while to see the full advantage of the upgrade.