Which ISP

[AlanD]

Every year I revisit this question and get some competitive quotes. Seemingly every ISP want to sell me a leased line. Some are reluctant, almost unwilling to sell anything but a asymmetric broadband saying all schools need leased lines. I have looked repeatedly at our traffic graphs and tested our 80:20 Mb/s fttc, and on average we only use around 30mb/s with peaks...and tests show no contention with sharing during the day, nor throttling. And upload data rates barely rise above 5mb/s. After adding BYOD for students we added a virgin 50:5 mb/s connection in a load balancing arrangement. Still graphs are well within our limits and everyone says how quickthe Internet is. Yes, we do use a proxy/cache which supplies around 40% of requests. I can see that at some point using loads of cloud storage this might change, and yes our email server is hosted on site. Do schools really need expensive leased lines now that fttc is so fast? Virgin business are even offering 200 Mb/s unlimited un-throttled during day for a lot less than a leased line a lot cheaper than leased line. Do others just go with what suppliers advise or do they really require high upload speeds of leased lines....and if so...what are these schools doing that we are not? We even use void with fttc without issues.

[Oaktech]

I would always go leased line basically because if it fails you have a guarantee of a fix in a timely fashion or compensation. With an adsl/fttc connection, even a business one, chances are you will have no service level agreement. If it fails they are under no more obligation to get you going again than Joe Bloggs at number 52.

 

We are a 2 school federation with about 1000 users total and about 450 devices. We have a 100mb symetrical leased line with a 60mb FTTC backup line. We very occasionally peak our circuit - but it's usually me downloading an ISO.

[AlanD]

Yes - I accept that timely fixes are highly desirable these days - if not for classroom use then for Email. This is partly why we added a Virgin Cable connection - as I thought it was pretty unlikely that two different Internet Connection technologies - OpenReach Fibre and Virgin Cable would both fail. They even come in at different ends of the schools. Failing that - our router also has a USB socket that will take a 4G dongle - which would maintain Email access for us, and emergency web access. But even a leased line can be out effectively for a whole day before you get anyone to fix it, so you probably do want something else - and indeed as you say you have a 60Gb FTTC for this very purpose. So given that you still need the second connection - perhaps there is little merit in the service level on the first connection - and you could save £5000 a year by just having 2 x FTTC connections.

[Opendium_Steve]

I would always go leased line basically because if it fails you have a guarantee of a fix in a timely fashion or compensation. With an adsl/fttc connection, even a business one, chances are you will have no service level agreement. If it fails they are under no more obligation to get you going again than Joe Bloggs at number 52.

 

We are a 2 school federation with about 1000 users total and about 450 devices. We have a 100mb symetrical leased line with a 60mb FTTC backup line. We very occasionally peak our circuit - but it's usually me downloading an ISO.

 

I dunno, I've seen BT take an age to fix problems on some leased lines. Getting a pair for completely independent asymmetric connections (e.g. FTTC and Virgin) is potentially a reasonable strategy, rather than a single leased line - you can use them concurrently normally, but if one goes pop you can just fail over to the other. Very much depends on the size of the school.

 

IMHO Virgin's 50/5Mbps connections have a disproportionately slow upstream, which is becoming increasingly important as cloud services become more common (storing data in the cloud == more uploads), and a saturated upstream can limit downstream rates too. But at the end of the day if no one is complaining about things being slow, there's probably no need to proactively look to upgrade the existing connections.

[ReBoot]

I been using Spitfire for our 80/20 service into a primary school for nearly two years now. For £41 (inc. line rental) a month I think its good value.

 

VDSL Fibre Broadband – VStream® | Spitfire

 

Zen Internet also have a great reputation for customer service.

 

https://www.zen.co.uk/business/broadband/fibre-optic-broadband.aspx#broadband

 

As to whether you need a leased line you need to look at your traffic profile and available budget.

 

For my primary the Spitfire service with a local caching proxy server is a good fit for our requirements.

[Jamman960]

We've recently upgraded to an EoFTTC connection to get some level of uncontended bandwidth and service level agreement without going for a leased line, I'll probably bring in another one once we move to voip/sip and can get rid of our isdn's. We're lucky to have 2 different exchanges available in different areas of our sites so dual fttc/EoFTTC should be reliable enough

[Achandler]

The EoFTTC looks interesting but sadly, the costs at 100Mb seems to be close toa Leased Line anyways for us.