mikkydoos Posted June 18, 2015 Posted June 18, 2015 Most Birmingham schools have probably seen this already. For those that haven't........ "Virgin Media have advised us that with effect from 20 June, they will be increasing the price of their Centrex telephony lines from £5 per month to £9.50 per month. There is no justification for this price increase and despite many years of customer loyalty, Virgin Media are unwilling to negotiate to improve this offer. To counter this unwelcome news, Link2ICT are now accelerating deployment of a fully cloud based VoIP telephony solution which will provide schools with a far cheaper alternative that includes all call charges. This will be available during the autumn term." We don't subscribe to Link2ICT's services but do have their Virgin phone lines (non VOIP). So for us, line rental has doubled. Anyone mind posting what you're paying for your VOIP service, and how much bandwidth its using up. I'm reading its around 1mbps per 10 concurrent calls. Doubtful that its worth it for us as we've got less than 20 phone lines. We do however have a 50mbps leased line which is plenty.
Michael Posted June 19, 2015 Posted June 19, 2015 In real terms it means the price goes up by £54 per year (£4.50 per month). Not really worth moving to another provider for such a low amount in my view.
mikkydoos Posted June 19, 2015 Author Posted June 19, 2015 No. But its given me an excuse to see which of the lines we'll be paying £10 a month for that I'll keep. I've found 10 unused ones already = £100/month. I'm not sure Link2 will be around for that much longer.
Michael Posted June 19, 2015 Posted June 19, 2015 To be honest it's more a case of putting all your eggs in one basket with VOIP. If your connection goes down, you lose everything. I'd say you'd need at least one backup line, which again sort of defeats the objective really.
MatthewL Posted June 19, 2015 Posted June 19, 2015 Can you not opt into their VOIP and create a VPN tunnel between you and them for the traffic?
Michael Posted June 21, 2015 Posted June 21, 2015 Can you not opt into their VOIP and create a VPN tunnel between you and them for the traffic? Probably, but the VPN tunnel still won't work if ever the connection went down. I know this is unlikely, but it does happen. The odds of the lease line and phone line going down at the same time is most unlikely, as they're coming from different locations.
mikkydoos Posted June 24, 2015 Author Posted June 24, 2015 and now they're not..... yet http://ebriefing.bgfl.org/bcc_ebrief/resource/?id=11666 Jebus
Michael Posted June 24, 2015 Posted June 24, 2015 The monitoring service is an interesting concept, however part of me thinks why doesn't the Policy Central software itself do all the hard work instead of going through hundreds and hundreds of false positives as standard? Doesn't seem too much of an ask.
BudgetChallenger Posted July 27, 2015 Posted July 27, 2015 its the "human" bit that needs to be in place if safeguarding issue found I guess
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now