Oaktech Posted October 2, 2015 Posted October 2, 2015 We haven't seem to have had the other issue you have - maybe because we are with a different broadband provider, but the proxy did just drop out for a couple of minutes Yeah, dropped out here too. We're literally counting down the days until our new service is finished and active!
newpersn Posted October 2, 2015 Posted October 2, 2015 Yeah, dropped out here too. We're literally counting down the days until our new service is finished and active! We got about 6month left i think.... Cant wait now.... An Incident Update Has Been Posted After further investigation it was deduced that multiple regions were affected via a brief outage which has since been resolved. This was due to a link dropping in part of the network. This is now resolved, and we are continuing to monitor closely.
witch Posted October 2, 2015 Posted October 2, 2015 We have a new broadband provider but our proxy and filtering still goes through SWGfL as generally we are happy with them - and they are quite cheap!
localzuk Posted October 2, 2015 Author Posted October 2, 2015 I'm surprised you guys have lasted this long. Our head wouldn't (and didn't) stand for that sort of service. All down to cost for us. Sadly we're stuck with them! There's no prospect for us to increase our internet bill from about £6k pa to around £20k pa. Just can't justify it, even with the downtime. I would *love* to move away.
CyberNerd Posted October 2, 2015 Posted October 2, 2015 All down to cost for us. Sadly we're stuck with them! There's no prospect for us to increase our internet bill from about £6k pa to around £20k pa. Just can't justify it, even with the downtime. I would *love* to move away. I guess that isn't your call then. We found the money because the loss to teaching and learning was too great. Internet vs a HLTA / couple of TLA stages / half an SLT member. Different schools have different priorities.
Opendium_Steve Posted October 2, 2015 Posted October 2, 2015 All down to cost for us. Sadly we're stuck with them! There's no prospect for us to increase our internet bill from about £6k pa to around £20k pa. Just can't justify it, even with the downtime. I would *love* to move away. Any other schools nearby that you could share with? We've helped a few schools club together to share a connection that would be too expensive for them to afford individually. i.e. figure out which of a group of schools is geographically in the best place, put an internet connection in there and then point-to-point microwave or laser links between the schools to share out the connection.
localzuk Posted October 2, 2015 Author Posted October 2, 2015 Any other schools nearby that you could share with? We've helped a few schools club together to share a connection that would be too expensive for them to afford individually. i.e. figure out which of a group of schools is geographically in the best place, put an internet connection in there and then point-to-point microwave or laser links between the schools to share out the connection. Don't think it'd be much good here. There are schools nearby but none that'd have any form of line of sight.
Opendium_Steve Posted October 2, 2015 Posted October 2, 2015 Don't think it'd be much good here. There are schools nearby but none that'd have any form of line of sight. Depends what's blocking the line of sight - some of the (fairly cheap) point-to-point links these days can cope with a few buildings and trees in the way. A hill in the way is another matter though. Also in some cases it doesn't cost the earth to get a fibre link between sites, but again, that's quite geography dependent.
localzuk Posted October 2, 2015 Author Posted October 2, 2015 Its something I am going to be bearing in mind if our MAT comes to fruition. How we as a group could make some savings and improve service. There's still a while to go until I'll know though.
kidpressingbuttons Posted October 2, 2015 Posted October 2, 2015 SWGFL is anything but cheap to us- been looking round and we could get 8x the speed for the same money or the same speeds for a fraction of the costs. Prices will only increase as more schools jump ship!
CyberNerd Posted October 2, 2015 Posted October 2, 2015 SWGFL is anything but cheap to us- been looking round and we could get 8x the speed for the same money or the same speeds for a fraction of the costs. Prices will only increase as more schools jump ship! The plus side to this as more schools leave, the load will lower and the speed will increase :-)
witch Posted October 3, 2015 Posted October 3, 2015 Expensive broadband - provided by K-Com - The LA negotiated keeping all the SWGfL filtering and found out all about other options for us - FTTC in our case. Cheaper, and faster. And we still get the SWGfL support. Been pretty good
witch Posted October 5, 2015 Posted October 5, 2015 SWGfL can offer better solutions to all of you it seems. Have you looked at what they have got? Our solution was much faster and much cheaper
Oaktech Posted October 5, 2015 Posted October 5, 2015 SWGfL can offer better solutions to all of you it seems. Have you looked at what they have got? Our solution was much faster and much cheaper I have... and they can't! I've beaten Steve from schoolcare with a stick until he got the Broadband4 product down to a price I was prepared to pay. I'm just waiting for BT to do groundworks and then we'll be good to go. I've today, started the process of extricating our DNS records from RM and re-registering our .sch.uk domain with a new registrar.
witch Posted October 5, 2015 Posted October 5, 2015 I have... and they can't! I've beaten Steve from schoolcare with a stick until he got the Broadband4 product down to a price I was prepared to pay. I'm just waiting for BT to do groundworks and then we'll be good to go. I've today, started the process of extricating our DNS records from RM and re-registering our .sch.uk domain with a new registrar. Really? What on earth were you paying before? Ours is up to seven times the speed and a little bit cheaper
Oaktech Posted October 5, 2015 Posted October 5, 2015 Because of our location in 'the valley that internet forgot' SWGFL wanted nearly £9k a year to provide us with a 100mb synchronous on a 100mb bearer with filtering with a 6k installation charge based on a 5yr term. They wouldn't entertain us sharing the connection with the school across the road. I'm getting broadband4 from Steve on a 3yr contract offering me 100mb synchronous on a 1gb bearer with lightspeed ad-linked filtering with free* installation, a microwave link to the other school, VLAN config across our network and double scope filtering on the lightspeed units for £6k a year. *We've had to pay an £1100 excess construction charge to BT because of a blocked duct which required a road closure
localzuk Posted October 5, 2015 Author Posted October 5, 2015 Because of our location in 'the valley that internet forgot' SWGFL wanted nearly £9k a year to provide us with a 100mb synchronous on a 100mb bearer with filtering with a 6k installation charge based on a 5yr term. They wouldn't entertain us sharing the connection with the school across the road. I'm getting broadband4 from Steve on a 3yr contract offering me 100mb synchronous on a 1gb bearer with lightspeed ad-linked filtering with free* installation, a microwave link to the other school, VLAN config across our network and double scope filtering on the lightspeed units for £6k a year. *We've had to pay an £1100 excess construction charge to BT because of a blocked duct which required a road closure That's positively cheap!!
localzuk Posted October 5, 2015 Author Posted October 5, 2015 We are paying a lot lot less than that Last quote I had direct from SWGfL (rather than via our LEA who then use SWGfL) for a 100Mbit line - £4200 setup, £17,000 pa for the line. Ok, that was a few years ago now, but the price won't have dropped enough to make it affordable yet.
Oaktech Posted October 5, 2015 Posted October 5, 2015 We are paying a lot lot less than that But what are you getting for that? By the time you add up the £2200 adsl and filtering charge from swgfl and the £1250 pstn charges from the telco, we are currently paying nearly £3.5k a year for a 10mb/1mb connection (because that is the best ADSL available here in the valley that internet forgot) and SWGFL flaky filtering! Our other school currently has 30mb/4mb virgin line that is a residential line and has been threatened with disconnection because their previous BM lied to get it installed (it goes to the caretakers house and then into the school) and only TMG for filtering. They currently pay £25ppm for their internet, but of course if it goes down they can be without internet for days as it's just a residential line Suddenly getting ten times the connection, for a little less than double the money and it being for 2 schools not 1, and having proxy-less AD linked filtering looks like a right old bargain!
Boredguy Posted October 5, 2015 Posted October 5, 2015 Last quote I had direct from SWGfL (rather than via our LEA who then use SWGfL) for a 100Mbit line - £4200 setup, £17,000 pa for the line. Ok, that was a few years ago now, but the price won't have dropped enough to make it affordable yet. Well I've had a rough quote for our SWGfL renewal that I need to sort out before the end of the school year, and to upgrade to the 100Mb circuit is actually cheaper per year than our current 50Mb. The Telco charge itself at present is around the £10,500 mark, but should be dropping down to less than £8,000 if we choose to continue (plus the other annual costs and it's nearer £12k but that's still an saving of £3k ish on year 2 & 3) We're limited to BTO provisioned options due to our location but even quotes from BT and SchoolsBroadband come out at similar price levels
kidpressingbuttons Posted October 5, 2015 Posted October 5, 2015 I think it is starting to sink into SMT that we need to move away from the Grid- more and more of our services are cloud based and they want to invest in more bandwidth heavy software when we can barely handle downloading email. Every day I have to deal with a SWGFL related issue and its just a complete waste of time. We are central to the town so its not like we are out in the sticks so you would think we could receive a suitable connection! A lot of local schools here are considering moving so the grid need to improve or face a loss in customers. In regards to the comment earlier about less burden on the line- that is very true and we could see some improvement on speeds, but we currently pay quite a large amount for a pretty terrible service so I don't think many schools will put up with paying more for something that simply doesn't work.
SchoolsBroadband Posted October 5, 2015 Posted October 5, 2015 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
SchoolsBroadband Posted October 5, 2015 Posted October 5, 2015 (edited) Good point @kidpressingbuttons what's the point getting a great price for something if it doesn't actually do what it says on the tin?! Dave I think it is starting to sink into SMT that we need to move away from the Grid- more and more of our services are cloud based and they want to invest in more bandwidth heavy software when we can barely handle downloading email. Every day I have to deal with a SWGFL related issue and its just a complete waste of time. We are central to the town so its not like we are out in the sticks so you would think we could receive a suitable connection! A lot of local schools here are considering moving so the grid need to improve or face a loss in customers. In regards to the comment earlier about less burden on the line- that is very true and we could see some improvement on speeds, but we currently pay quite a large amount for a pretty terrible service so I don't think many schools will put up with paying more for something that simply doesn't work. Edited October 5, 2015 by SchoolsBroadband
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