DG01 Posted February 20, 2008 Posted February 20, 2008 Are any of you experiencing a slower internet connections and continuous "security scans" for both web pages and downloads after the Norfolk County Council/ICT Solutions maintenance during half term? The selection of web pages appear to be random and the system seems to think they're downloads... just wondered if this was a fluke for everyone? We're getting complaints from staff because the security scans are meaning that they have to wait ages to load resources. This never was a problem before maintenance.
Pumaedition Posted February 20, 2008 Posted February 20, 2008 in short...yes. Over the past months, let alone few weeks, the service hasn't exactly been the most reliable unfortunately, so much so, we are investigating our own Leased Line and costings....as the £27k we get charged for Broadband access is astronomical!
kmount Posted February 20, 2008 Posted February 20, 2008 What speed does your line operate at for the £27k?
plexer Posted February 20, 2008 Posted February 20, 2008 Puma: In reality the school is not currently paying for the service the money is given to the lea from the government for our internet. For some strange reason the lea then gives the schools the money to pay for it into their school budgets and then takes it away again to pay for it. If you opt out of the nsix connection you will not get the money so the school would have to fund any alternative connection fully themselves. You would also lose access to things such as the RBC, Janet and NEN which is something your school probably would not want. But yes the service doesn't seem to have got any better after these "upgrades". Jack: Is John still there? Ben
ninjabeaver Posted February 20, 2008 Posted February 20, 2008 Not really noticed to much difference here TBH. But then I'm a bit of a BOFH when it comes to Internet Access. I've got a very strong line manage who is also in the SMT. It's now school policy that any kid caught on the Internet non-educational games is given an insta-ban from the internet, and they have to see my LM to get re-instated. It's not pleasant for the students at all.
Pumaedition Posted February 20, 2008 Posted February 20, 2008 What speed does your line operate at for the £27k? it runs at 8mb
kmount Posted February 20, 2008 Posted February 20, 2008 I looked into getting our own leased line arrangement last year and it was closer to 30k to match what we have for 13k last year. 10mbit leased line with web/email etc filtering/hosting.
DG01 Posted February 20, 2008 Author Posted February 20, 2008 Hasn't been too bad today so far but we'll see how it goes... Ben: Yeah John is still here at BJX.
m2d2 Posted February 20, 2008 Posted February 20, 2008 in short...yes. Over the past months, let alone few weeks, the service hasn't exactly been the most reliable unfortunately, so much so, we are investigating our own Leased Line and costings....as the £27k we get charged for Broadband access is astronomical! £27K!!! Surely you mean £2700? You can't doing the equivalent of buying half and ICT suite just to get on the Internet each year?
russdev Posted February 20, 2008 Posted February 20, 2008 What other services do you get as part of rbc offering (filter, email, portal etc etc) Russ
plexer Posted February 20, 2008 Posted February 20, 2008 If only. Yes the figure is 27K which gives us, email for all staff/students, web filtering, smtp relay, web site hosting, access to E2BN, video conferencing. It also means that all schools in norfolk are effectively a wan enabling inter school communication. VLE is extra. Ben
m2d2 Posted February 20, 2008 Posted February 20, 2008 Yes the figure is 27K which gives us, email for all staff/students, web filtering, smtp relay, web site hosting, access to E2BN, video conferencing. It also means that all schools in norfolk are effectively a wan enabling inter school communication. VLE is extra. Ben Blimey! Makes Synetrix (LgFL) look half decent by comparision. I think we pay just under a quater of what you do for pretty much the same facilites ... oh and the joy that is Sophos. It must just be economies of scale. Still, you get all the picturesque conutryside, I suppose.
plexer Posted February 20, 2008 Posted February 20, 2008 Norfolk schools rural locations is the biggest factor I think. Our whole service is managed by BT and most schools have a fibre link into the bt network to facilitate the setup. Ben
ChrisN-0123 Posted February 21, 2008 Posted February 21, 2008 Yup Slow here in Kings Lynn too. Capitaes.co.uk was impossible to use.. yet on ADSL it worked perfect. The whole structure needs looking at really, i think it is appauling for the money we spend on it. We're opencaste as well and some how we now have bluecoat filter blocking nearly everything. Reported issue in September and it is still not fixed.
ninjabeaver Posted February 22, 2008 Posted February 22, 2008 I did not think we actually paid for it. As someone posted on here earlier or on another post we get the £27K paid into the school then taken straight out again. Again, I might have the pooey end of the stick here...... but if we are paying for it as a school thats one hell of a lot of money per year. Plus they also want about £9K a year for this VLE they are "giving us". We'll see.
plexer Posted February 22, 2008 Posted February 22, 2008 Twas me, we don't pay for it really we get given the money. However this money won't be coming forever and at some point I fully expect the schools to have to fund this out of their own pocket, for the poor service we wouldn't be forking out 27K. Just recently they have performed 2 lots of planned maintenance on the system on a monday at 3:00pm and the next monday at 3:30pm. After the first monday when we came in the next day something had been misconfigured and the connection was slowed to a crawl, this was fixed around lunch time. After the other period of maintenance we came in the next day to find that every site you tried to visit resulted in an access denied message from their filtering proxies. Terrible. Ben
DG01 Posted February 22, 2008 Author Posted February 22, 2008 After the other period of maintenance we came in the next day to find that every site you tried to visit resulted in an access denied message from their filtering proxies. After the complaints started rolling in they got on it pretty quickly
Innermumbo Posted March 3, 2008 Posted March 3, 2008 £27K!!! Surely you mean £2700? You can't doing the equivalent of buying half and ICT suite just to get on the Internet each year? The cost of a leased line depends upon your location and Enfield, London is most likely well connected with fiber! We have a few schools in Norfolk who can't get traditional symmetrical broadband at all and we're looking at alternative connection technologies to meet the Government requirements.
GrumbleDook Posted March 3, 2008 Posted March 3, 2008 Twas me, we don't pay for it really we get given the money. However this money won't be coming forever and at some point I fully expect the schools to have to fund this out of their own pocket, for the poor service we wouldn't be forking out 27K. There is a commitment from the Govt to continue to fund RBC connections for some time. The way the money is allocated will be changing over the years and the funding for ICT in general may drop (YMMV when considering BSF and PFI) it is expected it will cover connectivity. Funding for ICT and sustainability is a whole different discussion though. The other problem with connectivity charges is the BT have put their prices up in a major way for most areas recently. Cost savings elsewhere are now lost.
DG01 Posted November 21, 2008 Author Posted November 21, 2008 Nice to see this issue made an appearance again on Wednesday =]
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