Recommended School Broadband Suppliers

[northeast_technician]

Hello all, our contract runs out in August 2017 but I wanted to look into no LA solutions for broandand, filtering etc also for the link for admin machines back to the la. Could anyone recommend any suppliers based on past / current experiences also is there any that we need to stay clear of?

 

Kind regards

[SchoolsBroadband]

Hi @northeast_technician

 

we do all of that and look after a few hundred schools in the north east already. I'm sure a few of our customers on Edugeek here will say a few positive things about us

 

Personally I'd recommend staying clear of normal broadband suppliers that don't specialise in the Education market as they will just sell you a line and don't understand the duty of care and services a school needs to give to its staff and pupils, particularly when it comes to filtering, working with the police, anti extremist act etc etc

 

I'm sure prices will change from now until August 2017 but if you wanted an indicative quote do send me a PM.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[mrbios]

I'd recommend @SchoolsBroadband they've been very good to us

 

I still have my own doubts about the firewall being outside the physical network, but that's just me not adjusting well to change the solution they provide is fantastic though.

[IrritableTech]

We have a bunch of schools using Schools Broadband for the last two to two and a half years. Installation, management and support have all been very good and overall all the schools have been happy with the service and price. A totally different experience to our days with the LEA provider.

[clockend25]

We've been with @SchoolsBroadband for three years now. There were some issues in the early days but it's better across the board now.

[northeast_technician]

this info is great guys, what speeds are you getting and are they consistent?

[mrbios]

this info is great guys, what speeds are you getting and are they consistent?

 

100 up 100 down. Seems pretty consistent, hard to tell for ourselves though as so many users are using it and speedtest websites aren't really all that accurate, but even the inaccurate speed tests normally report 70-80 down and 50-60 up with 100s of users using the machines in school.

[IrritableTech]

this info is great guys, what speeds are you getting and are they consistent?

 

As @northeast_technician suggests, speed tests aren't much use - but here's our bandwidth graph for this morning.

 

 

It's fairly typical of our usage but bare in mind this graph shows some averaging. But as you can see we can hit 90-100Mbits without too much bother.

[themightymrp]

We get ours from Virgin and that's been great. We do our own filtering/firewall with a Bloxx and PaloAlto unit. Have also used Exa Networks at another school and they've been OK apart from a few niggly issues. I also would source a separate filtering system instead of Exa's own SurfProtect as it isn't the most in depth.

 

My opinion of course

[synaesthesia]

@SchoolsBroadband here - they've been solid. Support is good, speeds are excellent and they've never been shy in actually asking for opinions. The provided service Lightspeed is excellent and reliable.

I do like to try and remain unbiased and in full truthfulness there have been ups and downs - their competitive pricing ensured they had a ton of custom very suddenly and a while ago (2 years I think) they struggled somewhat in keeping their support service up to speed. They resolved this quickly with a restructure and we've had no problems since, it was certainly good enough for our whole academy chain to sign up with them and we haven't regretted doing so.

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them; they certainly know what they're doing especially when taking over schools from LA contracts and you'll no doubt be surprised how differently (positive) things are done when the LEA isn't involved.

[Jamman960]

We currently use Cerberus Networks, they've been faultless for the last 5 years or so, they're able to offer hosted firewall/filtering but I've found it cheaper to do it I'm house with a cyberoam utm

[EXA_Mark]

We get ours from Virgin and that's been great. We do our own filtering/firewall with a Bloxx and PaloAlto unit. Have also used Exa Networks at another school and they've been OK apart from a few niggly issues. I also would source a separate filtering system instead of Exa's own SurfProtect as it isn't the most in depth.

 

My opinion of course

 

Thanks for the comment. If you are ever interested in looking at our services again I am sure you would find SurfProtect a very different system to what you used at that time. We are always continuing to develop it and features such as AD integration, Prevent Duty, Reporting, the new panel interface are among the newest features of late, but we have a lot to show before the end of the year, and if you are coming down to BETT this year, please pop by our stand and take a look, would be really interested in your feedback from a then and now perspective. The current version of SurfProtect Fusion offers all the same capability as many of the other providers, including the likes of Lightspeed.

 

Also we too have a large number of schools in the North East, so if anyone would like to speak to them for references just let us know.

[northeast_technician]

so what about filtering, its primary schools i look after

[SchoolsBroadband]

so what about filtering, its primary schools i look after

 

we do cloud based Lightspeed which for primary schools is brilliant. It offers full HTTPS support as well from day one so no need for any onsite kit. Full integration with active directory and full per user reporting.

 

See Web Filter for Schools - Lightspeed Systems

 

Dave

[jaminben]

+1 for Virgin as well... excellent service.

 

Our filtering is with Smoothwall.

[robjduk]

Whats the fasted connection schools broadband will offer? I looked into it a while back and seemed to list 80 as the highest. Im going to need at least 150mbps.

[synaesthesia]

That'll depend on what you want - they'll go as high as you like on a leased line, and I'm sure they'll be happy to provide bonded lines for their fibre offerings to get you to the number you want. That'll probably be the best way if upload isn't so much of an issue, if you need the same both ways it's leased line time, and the world's your oyster there from 50mbit to a gig and beyond.

[SchoolsBroadband]

Whats the fasted connection schools broadband will offer? I looked into it a while back and seemed to list 80 as the highest. Im going to need at least 150mbps.

 

Hi @robjduk,

@synaesthesia is correct. We offer speeds of up to 10Gbit. The 80Mbit product you are referring to is FTTC or EoFTTC which currently has a technical top limit of circa 80Mbit.

 

We do not do bonding or balancing of FTTC or EoFTTC lines as we find the outcome of doing so is pretty poor.

 

We don't actually offer a leased line of 150Mbit so to achieve this we'd install 200Mbit bandwidth on a 1Gbit bearer. This will give you guaranteed 1:1 contention ratio of 200Mbit upload and download. We're finding this is more and more commonplace for secondary schools now in particular.

 

I'll send you a PM but feel free to ask anymore questions.

 

Thanks

 

Dave