Schoolsbroadband issues - filter 11

[tj2419]

Is anyone else on filter 11 with schools broadband? We are being plagued with outages on a near daily basis at the moment and it has been going on for weeks now!

 

It is causing major issues. If you are with schools broadband on a different filter is it working?

[Spence_101]

Internet fully down here too (we're also on filter11). Been plagued with problems ever since joining them in December. I can't think of a single week without problems.

[Blue_Cookeh]

We had loads of problems but since they reconfigured Filter11 with (I believe) 3 different filters last week ours has been fine.

 

I had an e-mail from their complaints department a couple of days ago saying they wanted to schedule a call with us about it. It certainly started to make me look bad to our SLT since I was the one that wanted to move us away from our LA to TalkStraight back in April!

[itsnotme]

its working at the moment here on filter 11 but the last few weeks its been awful. The school im at moved from one isp to another because they had issues with their filter box which was not up to the job and now almost every other day filter 11 goes awry. Other schools I deal with on filters other than 11 have no issues

[ful56_uk]

We are on filter 9 and we have no internet here either

[tj2419]

Yes, we seem to have been switched to filter 12 at the moment as all our users are being asked to log in.

 

Same situation here, I pushed for us to move away from LA and this is really being awful.

[The_Oracle]

Same here at both of my schools, and this week we have online exams! Not impressed.

[jertsy]

filter 5 here and all seems to be OK

[whs1000]

Posted in another thread but we are on filter11, since we joined we have had nothing but problems - the school have lost confidence in their services - where is the high availability and redundancy we were promised ?

[synaesthesia]

Filter 9 here at a few of my schools and all down. Very, very unhappy and no longer able to recommend Schools Broadband as a reliable supplier of internet, despite my backing over the years. They're in clear breach of SLA and will no doubt be losing a lot of schools.

I know it's easy to say from an end-user perspective but what on earth is up with the configuration there? For their SLA to be feasible to themselves, those lightspeed rockets need to be clustered with full redundancy. That's either not possible or not happening, either way someone needs a finger wagging at them.

[clockend25]

We're filter 5 and it's been fine here for a long time. Have been seeing the email updates come through wondering if we're going to have problems next ...

[tekins]

Filter 9 here, getting fed up with the outages. ECDL lessons ruined again.

[Spence_101]

We're filter 5 and it's been fine here for a long time. Have been seeing the email updates come through wondering if we're going to have problems next ...

 

Where can I sign up for email updates? Seeing as the support team don't even contact or update us, email updates may actually be of use.

[synaesthesia]

@SchoolsBroadband would do well to share the email that David Tindall has just sent to me explaining what's happened and what they're doing. Whether it changes anyones mind or not I don't know, it probably won't change the minds of the primaries I work with as I've already been asked to start investigating alternative provision.

[clockend25]

I'd imagine you need to check who they have down as contacts. There was a time previously where I would receive nothing and subsequently found out they only had our finance assistant's email as a contact. We now get the technical updates through.

[SchoolsBroadband]

@synaesthesia we'll be sending out full comms as per usual.

 

It's not been a great week for our effected customers and we sincerely apologise for that and we're doing everything we can to put things right. There's a lot of new equipment already installed with more to come too.

 

The effected clusters are stable again with normal service resumed following a short issue this morning.

 

The vast majority of our customers have been absolutely fine with no issues whatsoever and have been for years. We must do better though and we will.

 

Dave

[SchoolsBroadband]

Where can I sign up for email updates? Seeing as the support team don't even contact or update us, email updates may actually be of use.

 

@Spence_101

 

please email [email protected] and she'll add you to the update list.

 

Dave

[synaesthesia]

For all involved, check your SLA - every hour outage equates to a day's refund.

[CyBeRkId2002]

they definitely have our contact details and we have received nothing!

 

Quite frankly it is getting ridiculous now and strongly feel that the company aren't in the position and don't have the support team and technical staff (although one or two in the technical team have been very good) to compete and call themselves a leading ISP.

 

In the space of 5ish months we are on our third written complaint (none of which received a formal response), have had numerous outages (believe it or not this isn't necessarily our biggest) and have received what can only be described as appalling customer service. I'm not one to go around bad-mouthing companies but feel that schoolsbroadband have had every opportunity to make this right with us over the past few months and I am starting to see us parting ways (early and without penalty due to the continual breaches of SLA) as the only solution at present.

[hillskill]

We have been having the same issues at my school for the past few weeks too, on Filter 11. This has been totally unacceptable and I too will no longer be recommending them to any of partner or trust schools.

 

I will also be looking at ways we can cancel our contract early and change supplier. I accept that downtime will happen, that's part of IT, but this is meant to be an enterprise level provider and our service has been worse than my £10 per month home broadband recently!

[SchoolsBroadband]

PM'd......

[hillskill]

Also we are finding that even after services have been restored our filters take a long time to actually start working properly again. Lessons disrupted, staff unable to work, its really been appalling.

[tj2419]

Us too. The internet connection comes back but then everyone has to log into their browsers to get the connection working again on their desktop. Since it started working again this morning I, myself, have had to log in three times within a couple of hours.

With regards to the SLA the issue is keeping track of all of the outages there has been that many the last couple of weeks! I would like to know what is different with the affected filters compared to the ones that work?

[whs1000]

For all involved, check your SLA - every hour outage equates to a day's refund.

 

Unfortunately there is a limit to how much can be claimed for - "Service Credits are limited to not more than 5 days in any Quarter (Jan-Mar, Mar- Jun, Jun – Sep, Sep – Dec)"

 

The whole month should be refunded as it has been going on for over 4 weeks now but the money isn't really an issue, we want to use the services paid for and quite often we haven't been able to. We would also consider moving ISP if Schools Broadband allow it without penalty.

 

As has been mentioned, even if the "short" downtime this morning (short or long doesn't matter as it affects teaching if its 5 minutes or hours) the filtering still doesn't behave as it should for hours - ie staff can not get access to youtube as they are not authenticated, ssl inspection doesn't work and so on.

[SchoolsBroadband]

@tj2419 investigations are ongoing but we believe it to be load based hence the new clusters being put in quickly. We're going to be moving a number of heavy school customers onto the newly built cluster tonight on top of ones we've already moved off.

 

There's a lot more work (and money being spent) going on top of what we've already done.

 

Dave