Who to invite to tender for Internet services ie broadband, firewall, etc

[ryoung]

Hi

 

I have prepared a invitation to tender document which invites interested parties to tender to supply the following Internet services from 01-06-2016 for a period of three years.

1. Broadband: 100 Mb uncontested connection and 10 Mb ADSL reserve back up

2. Network Security. The school requires adequate monitoring, filtering, firewalls, anti-virus, authentication and other network security systems to help ensure the safety of pupils and security of school data and services

3. Online security functions to protect users from inappropriate web material and offensive emails

 

I have two companies in mind to invite: Exa and South West Comms. I need at least one more. Any recommendations?

 

Happy to share our tender document if any other school is starting to plan for quotes

 

Thanks

 

Richard Young

Edited March 17, 2016 by ryoung
typo corrected from Gb to Mb

[sparkeh]

@SchoolsBroadband perhaps?

[Blue_Cookeh]

@SchoolsBroadband perhaps?

 

Recommended!

[Jawloms]

Gb??! Wowsers!!

 

RM, BT, @SchoolsBroadband.

[2ilent8cho]

Hi

1. Broadband: 100 Gb uncontested connection and 10 Gb ADSL reserve back up

 

Thats 1 big data pipe you need.

[Rob_D]

I believe exponential-E do a combined service covering internet security and cloud stuff.

They also (as I understand it) host bbc and youtube servers so you get lan speeds to those sites.

 

personally I'd be looking at getting the backup line from a different provider for better redundancy, but it's up to you.

[ryoung]

Interesting point. Thank you. We are a secondary school of some 1,000 students and 400 devices. No wireless (yet). Is 100Gb overkill in your view? What is a more appropriate figure?

[JordanT91]

The ones I was looking at last year were Virgin Media, RM, Schools Broadband, WebAnywhere, Exa and BT.

[Jawloms]

Massively overkill. My previous school was 1,400 students, 1,000 iPads, and around 250 desktops and 100 laptops. They managed absolutely fine on 500meg, and that cost them something like £35k pa for the line, the hardware was on top of that.

[The_IT_Guy]

We recently changed to schoolsbroadband and are a school with around 900 students and 500 devices. We purchased a 100mb synchronous connection from them using Virgin as the provider. They also provide all the firewall and filtering. Works well.

[JordanT91]

Massively overkill. My previous school was 1,400 students, 1,000 iPads, and around 250 desktops and 100 laptops. They managed absolutely fine on 500meg, and that cost them something like £35k pa for the line, the hardware was on top of that.

 

I assume it was a typo, you're going to need some serious line bonding to get 10Gb from ADSL!

[Jawloms]

I assume it was a typo, you're going to need some serious line bonding to get 10Gb from ADSL!

 

I assumed the same, but then when "GB" was pointed out twice, and he stuck with it in his questioning of overkill, I wondered maybe not....

[sparkeh]

Also, do you need one provider to do it all? Thought about procuring things like filtering and firewall separately?

[ryoung]

I will not tell you the number of staff who looked at my tender document and misread the spec. Clearly a typo :-) but still my bad. What I should have written is 100mb fibre, with 10mb redundancy from ADSL. A HUGE thanks for saving me from considerable embarrassment. Edited March 17, 2016 by ryoung

[HarryMonkey]

We also use exponential-e. When we did the same thing a couple of years or so ago, we looked at Virgin, BT, RM, Expo-e, softcat and a couple of others whose names escape me.

[SchoolsBroadband]

Thanks for the recommendations @sparkeh, @Blue_Cookeh, @Jawloms, @JordanT91

@ryoung, we look after probably a dozen secondary schools in Oxfordshire already and have done for many years. We've got quite a few re-signing with us as we speak.

 

More than happy to give you a quote. I know we can be very competitive on price but more importantly the use of our Lightspeed Education based content filtering and Fortigate dedicated virtual firewall really sets our service apart from all others giving you resilient devices as standard and doing everything in the cloud rather than having your boxes on site so no capital expenditure costs. Just an annual rental for the service which is fully managed but also gives you the ability to make changes yourself.

 

There's also no per user cost. Just one annual site licence so you have fixed costs also.

 

I'll send you a PM. We've lots of happy customers on here as you can tell who will vouch for us

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[Michael]

The biggest connection Virgin Media and probably BT do is 10Gbps for the record, so clearly there are 'some' customers out there who require such bandwidth.

 

The biggest connection I've heard of in a school is 1Gbps, so I think it's fair to say 100Gbps is still a way off. Multiple 100Gbps connections are probably used at core internet links, linking London to New York for example offering Terabits of data per second.

[SchoolsBroadband]

The largest we've put into a school so far is a 1Gbit which we still thought was overkill but the customer insisted.

 

We're start to see the norm becoming 200Mbit on a 1Gbit bearer for secondary schools though and have just done quite a few 500Mbit on a 1Gbit bearer in London.

 

Standard Ethernet circuits currently go up to 10Gbit with both BT (Ethernet Access Direct / EAD) and Virgin Media (Ethernet Extension). We can also use Dark Fibre and Waves where required which can in theory go as fast as the optics and repeaters you put on the end.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[Brimstone]

+1 @SchoolsBroadband

[seustice]

Insist on 1Gb bearer, even if you only take 100mb service, you can scale it up without installing a new fibre.

[timbo343]

I got a quote from a company called origin broadband. Seemed reasonable prices too.

[ellsandell]

RM, TNP Ltd (who we went with in the end), BT, Virgin Media, M247 to name a few when we were looking.

[Chris_]

We got some great quotes on leased lines going direct to Virgin Media, for example, we could get a 1Gb line on a 1Gb from VM for around the same price as a 200Mb line on a 1Gb bearer from BT.

 

We might not need 1Gb now but we max out the 100Mb line we currently have at peak times with ~150 users.

[Meldrew]

From my experience I would avoid South West Comms. I know of a school who are locked into a contract with them and any tech support requires a small mortgage. Also we used to use them and were very glad to be rid of them.

 

Meldrew.

[SchoolsBroadband]

Insist on 1Gb bearer, even if you only take 100mb service, you can scale it up without installing a new fibre.

 

So long as your past the first year of a contract on a 100/100 you can actually upgrade to a 1gbit bearer for a set cost and increase in rental at that point. The upgrade fee is normally about £2,500 when using a BT based circuit. This can work out cheaper than getting a 100/1Gbit connection from day 1.

 

Thanks

 

Dave