Not impressed lately

[snagrat]

Prices are still continuing to come down @Boredguy and @localzuk.

 

We've done a few 100Mbit including Lightspeed and Fortigate for £4,995pa for a primary school. Prices keep on going down and down and down.

 

One of the more costly elements is now doing proper inline anti-virus / IPS wire speed over 100Mbit. Many firewalls are different in the way this is handled and in our opinion if you want to protect yourself properly you need a good UTM device which is ASIC driven.

 

+ the good news is that as I'm on Edugeek and own my company I do like doing a "Dave Special" so please get in touch and I'll see how generous I am. It is nearly Xmas after all ;-)

 

Thanks

 

Dave

 

We sold one of our schools one of these £4,995 special. SWGfL could get now where near price wise!

[witch]

In our case it was Dorset LEA who got us the quotes and helped us move away from our old provider.

 

Even adding up the bits and pieces we still have a pretty cheap service

[kidpressingbuttons]

Less than 1 meg download speeds today on the staff proxy... Worth calling the grid? Nope.

[Steve21]

128Mb here via staff proxy Sorry stealing all your webz!

 

Steve

[CyberNerd]

what's the point getting a great price for something if it doesn't actually do what it says on the tin?!

 

It seems to be how a few local authorities negotiate these things. I don't know how they manage to purchase a service without an SLA. It's either corruption or incompetence.

I once went on a LA course about procurement and how we needed to test against different metrics for value for money. When I mentioned the (awful) broadband service I was told that I didn't need to go through a procurement exercise because "they did it". I went through the exercise anyway and the LA didn't even get shortlisted.

[JGoswell]

Hi,

 

I would encourage you to log a call with us if you feel there is an issue with the Staff Proxy Service you are using. We are currently not seeing any service issues with the Staff Proxy, but are keen to work with you to identify the root cause of what you are experiencing.

 

SWGfL Service Desk can be reached on 08453077870 (08:00 - 21:00 Mon - Fri)

[SchoolsBroadband]

That's brought a smile to my face being a Yorkshire man and selling broadband for a living

[pirran]

SWGFL down again early this morning for us. It happened before 8am so a great service as always (tinged with sarcasm):

1. No update on status page

2. Support line not open till 8am

3. No call or notification from SWGFL once they were open.

4. Eventually got through on the phone support and was told there had been a 'major proxy outage'.

 

How bad does a 24k pa service have to be before we should be permitted to exit with no charges outside the contract period? Am I over-reacting, opinions welcome.

 

Rant over.

[Boredguy]

SWGFL down again early this morning for us. It happened before 8am so a great service as always (tinged with sarcasm):

1. No update on status page

2. Support line not open till 8am

3. No call or notification from SWGFL once they were open.

4. Eventually got through on the phone support and was told there had been a 'major proxy outage'.

 

How bad does a 24k pa service have to be before we should be permitted to exit with no charges outside the contract period? Am I over-reacting, opinions welcome.

 

Rant over.

Strange, as the RSS feed we get showed this RM Internet & E-safety Status - RM SafetyNet - Planned Maintenance

 

Only time I've ever had a proactive call from SWGfL is when we've had our router turned off for 3 hours, and that's over the last 14 years. (and in that instance it was due to a powercut)

[witch]

That's odd. I rang SWGfL at 8am and was connected with a very pleasant guy who listened, went away to ask, and came back with all the appropriate info for me.

[Oaktech]

I had a wait on the phone at 7:50 but when they picked up they were perfectly pleasant, gave me a case ref and emailed my private email with an update, even though the update was essentially 'you'll just have to wait'

 

I've got no beef with their contact centre, I just shouldn't have to contact them nearly as much as I do!

[JGoswell]

Hi all,

 

Apologies to anyone affected by the proxy issue this morning.

 

We noticed the issue when it started just before 08:00 this morning and put out a status update by text and email at 08:02. We were back up and running by 08:08.

 

We updated our status page during the incident (RM Internet & E-safety Status) - you might have needed to scroll down half a screen to see the updates, depending on your device. It currently says, "Resolved - We can confirm that service has remained stable since it was restored at 08:08. Our engineers are currently working through the details of the root cause and mitigations to avoid a recurrence of such an issue."

 

Again, we do apologies for any inconvenience you experienced during the period.

 

Jamie @ RM

[pirran]

Sorry I should perhaps have added that the chap that we spoke to on the Technical Service desk was also helpful and polite. I certainly have no problems with the helpdesk persons, they provide for what they can a great service IMO. In fact individuals at SWGFL (not just helpdesk) I've dealt with have pretty much always been very polite, they just aren't in a position to 'fix' the on going service problems we have.

 

The reason for a wait at 7:50am is their opening hours, which is however a big problem when staff turn up from 7am and leave late in the evening and I'm sure this is the case with many school. When we're paying over 20k for a service that does go down far more frequently than it probably should (I'm referring to the proxy generally), having a non 24hour support line is very frustrating. My home internet connect has less issues that our premium SWGFL service and it's 40 times cheaper, I realise it's not the same type of connection but at least the service is there!

 

SWGFL: Our Service Desk is available

8.00am - 6.00pm, Monday - Friday.

[pirran]

Hi all,

 

Apologies to anyone affected by the proxy issue this morning.

 

We noticed the issue when it started just before 08:00 this morning and put out a status update by text and email at 08:02. We were back up and running by 08:08.

 

We updated our status page during the incident (RM Internet & E-safety Status) - you might have needed to scroll down half a screen to see the updates, depending on your device. It currently says, "Resolved - We can confirm that service has remained stable since it was restored at 08:08. Our engineers are currently working through the details of the root cause and mitigations to avoid a recurrence of such an issue."

 

Again, we do apologies for any inconvenience you experienced during the period.

 

Jamie @ RM

 

Thanks for the reply Jamie, however our connection was down long before 8am. I'm guessing it was only noticed just before 8am because that's when people who check these things are employed from, or thereabouts?

Is there some kind of support available outside of the usual hours (£2k a month connection here) are we just to wait if our service goes down on a busy morning, evening or weekend? Our problems for the last few years seem always to have been with the proxy service, no line faults I'm aware of.

 

Last week I received a random call from SWGFL to assure us 'you've been moved to the new higher capacity proxy service'. I wasn't aware this was going to happen and we'd supposedly been 'moved to a new proxy service' earlier in the year.

PL12 4AY is our postcode if you'd like to take a look at service log details.

 

Thanks for all your help, I honestly do realise that as individuals you all try to provide a great service. It just feels like the machine 'SWGFL' can't provide a reliable proxy connection, we've already a planned solution in place but being tied in contract limits my current options to well, none. It's frustrating when I look at the solutions Smoothwall UTM and similar products provide.

[Opendium_Steve]

Last week I received a random call from SWGFL to assure us 'you've been moved to the new higher capacity proxy service'. I wasn't aware this was going to happen and we'd supposedly been 'moved to a new proxy service' earlier in the year.

 

One of our customers was very surprised by that email too, since they'd already dropped all of the SWGFL proxy and filtering services weeks ago due to the ongoing performance problems.

[CyberNerd]

SWGFL: Our Service Desk is available

8.00am - 6.00pm, Monday - Friday.

 

That's ridiculous!

Who in their right mind would buy a into a 24*7 business service that operates 8am to 6pm ??!?!

[pirran]

Not me!

Unfortunately it was a business decision that started before I came into employment.

[pirran]

Hi Steve, are you saying you have a customer who uses SWGFL's internet connection but an alternative proxy and filtering solution? I thought this wasn't up for discussion, by that I mean SWGFL wouldn't provide an unfiltered connection?

If we could implement a Smoothwall UTM appliance before we exit SWGFL that might work out ok for us (all be it an additional cost).

 

Thanks

[Opendium_Steve]

Hi Steve, are you saying you have a customer who uses SWGFL's internet connection but an alternative proxy and filtering solution? I thought this wasn't up for discussion, by that I mean SWGFL wouldn't provide an unfiltered connection?

If we could implement a Smoothwall UTM appliance before we exit SWGFL that might work out ok for us (all be it an additional cost)

 

Well, we've got a bunch of customers on the SWGFL who use our filter appliances on their LAN "in front" of the SWGFL filters (they do this because they want better control/reporting than they get from the Safetynet stuff on the grid). Just after term started this year, the SWGFL's HTTPS transparent proxy was completely unusable for weeks. The customer in question was having so many problems that we told them the best course of action, at least as a temporary measure, would be to just get the grid to let their traffic straight out without going via the broken transparent proxy, and that this wasn't really a big problem from a safety perspective since they still had a filter on site. Somerset county pushed back saying it was a bad idea, but the school were also chasing the SWGFL over the slow proxy and someone at the grid ended up making exactly the same suggestion as us, so Somerset agreed and that's what happened.

 

I understand that Somerset now offer the filtering as a separate optional item, so that customer is now planning on saving some cash by opting out of the grid's filtering entirely. I don't know whether that applies to the whole SWGFL or just Somerset, and I've not heard any other people discuss filtering becoming an optional extra so I'm afraid I can't vouch for the accuracy of this information. All that said, that customer has been having plenty of other problems with SWGFL and/or Somerset county and I think their long term plan has become to just stick a leased line in and drop the grid entirely.

 

Hope that helps anyway.

[AJWhite1970]

I contacted SWGfL in September and asked for both my schools to bypass their proxy farm and just use our in-house filtering. The disclaimer form was sent through the same day and the bypass was put in place the following morning. We had one slight issue with YouTube but that was fixed the same morning, since then our connections have been flying...

 

Andrew

[JGoswell]

Hi all,

 

Just to pick up on a few of the points that have been made in the thread today:

 

Our engineers work 24/7/365 so we always have people monitoring and managing the network. The industry standard for support desks is to be open between 8am and 6pm – we provide 3hrs more than that, as we’re available until 9pm.

 

In respect to the issue today, a scheduled job ran at 07:45 this morning and introduced a problem. A failsafe kicked in which caused the proxy issue. It was immediately noticed by our engineers and was fixed by 08:08. We of course don’t want anyone to experience any service outage, and we’d like to apologise again, but the incident today lasted no more than 23 minutes.

 

On RM’s service more generally, we’ve made a multi-million pound investment in a new core network this year to improve performance and ensure future capacity. The project will deliver much improved proxy performance as we now have 200 servers dedicated to that task. As far as filtering goes, we’ve comprehensively addressed the Google SSL issue as part of the development. We’re also releasing cloud hosted, user-based filtering that’ll work for schools and school groups of any size. We’ve also invested £300,000 in a DDOS prevention system.

 

Sorry to go on a bit there but we felt we ought to respond to the comments raised by customers on the forum.

 

Jamie @ RM

Edited November 12, 2015 by JGoswell

[CyberNerd]

Hi all,

Our engineers work 24/7/365 so we always have people monitoring and managing the network. The industry standard for support desks is to be open between 8am and 6pm – we provide 3hrs more than that, as we’re available until 9pm.

 

I have a 247 support number, for when I get called at 11pm.

Perhaps you should consider asking your engineers to take calls out of hours like other firms do.

[localzuk]

I do have one comment @JGoswell - why are things like this morning's scheduled job done during term time, right before the start of a school day? If engineers are working all day and all year round, why aren't such tasks scheduled at 2am on a Saturday, for example?

 

We all work in IT, we all know "scheduled maintenance" can take longer than expected or can cause knock on issues, so the normal practice is to schedule things in such a way to minimise the potential for ongoing issues. I have maintenance planned that can't be performed until the December holidays, for example!

[ITGURU]

Hi all,

 

Just to pick up on a few of the points that have been made in the thread today:

 

Our engineers work 24/7/365 so we always have people monitoring and managing the network. The industry standard for support desks is to be open between 8am and 6pm – we provide 3hrs more than that, as we’re available until 9pm.

 

In respect to the issue today, a scheduled job ran at 07:45 this morning and introduced a problem. A failsafe kicked in which caused the proxy issue. It was immediately noticed by our engineers and was fixed by 08:08. We of course don’t want anyone to experience any service outage, and we’d like to apologise again, but the incident today lasted no more than 23 minutes.

 

On RM’s service more generally, we’ve made a multi-million pound investment in a new core network this year to improve performance and ensure future capacity. The project will deliver much improved proxy performance as we now have 200 servers dedicated to that task. As far as filtering goes, we’ve comprehensively addressed the Google SSL issue as part of the development. We’re also releasing cloud hosted, user-based filtering that’ll work for schools and school groups of any size. We’ve also invested £300,000 in a DDOS prevention system.

 

Sorry to go on a bit there but we felt we ought to respond to the comments raised by customers on the forum.

 

Jamie @ RM

 

 

Why was there an issue with Google SSL ? Our LA use netsweeper and saw no issues with google SSL.

Also, I was advised by one company that the issue of Google Translate being an open proxy and that is was a known issue with ALL filtering solutions. However, once I discovered our students were doing this, a simple report flagged up the single URL that needed entering to still allow google translate to work but not for website URLs ... why it was a simple fix for me and yet software companies couldn't work it out I do not know!!

[JGoswell]

Hi there @localzuk,

 

There are a few reasons. One is because we've often developed the update ourselves and need to have all the development team available when it goes live and they don't all work weekends. It's also because we have a very large, complex network supporting thousands of schools with different requirements, technologies etc. Because of that we simply have a lot of updates to do and some need to be done quickly. Having said that, we do try to schedule updates we think are more likely to cause issues on weekends and holidays.

 

Hope that helps.

 

Jamie @ RM