Primary School ISP

[owen1978]

We are a two form entry primary school. We currently have 100mb leased line with virgin and we utilize only 6% of it.

I have had various quotes from various suppliers mentioned on this board which have come in a lot cheaper but the question Im asking is

there any reason why I should not consider top end business line from BT or Virgin.

 

E.g. BT Infinity Premium, they have guaranteed bandwidth of 60Mb for £35pm

 

They have said its contended with other businesses in the area which isn't many

Would the router not be of suitable quality for a school?

Filtering and Firewall obviously would need to be supplied from a third party

SLA's are different compared to an EoFFTC connection

 

I probably will end up going for a EoFFTC line anyway but just wanted to know why it wouldn't be suitable for a primary school?

[Meldrew]

Should be fine. We're a secondary school that supports a number of primary schools in the area for their IT and/or broadband services. We've moved quite a few to a similar system, a BT FTTC/FTTP connection, £100 ish router, configured so that it only accepts traffic from the on-site web filtering box. Saved the schools a ton of money and works a treat.

 

Meldrew

[Opendium_Steve]

We've got customers on FTTC - seems fine for small schools.

[SchoolsBroadband]

BT Infinity Premium will not guarantee 60Mbit. This may be the speed at which it can sync at to the VDSL DSLAM in the BT green street cabinets but it's not guaranteed 1:1 contention ratio whatsoever hence why they've put the caveat in saying its contended with other businesses in the area so how can in that case they guarantee a speed of 60Mbit?!

 

EoFTTC does give you guaranteed speeds up to a certain amount which is 1:1 contention ratio and a much higher SLA.

 

The standard SLA on a BT Wholesale based FTTC connection is something of the ilk "BT Wholesale guarantees to deliver speeds of 12Mbit for 90% of the time during the busiest 3 hour period". You can pay to get the enhanced care on the line which increases this to 15Mbit as above but we find it's not worth the paper it's written on.

 

It's a bit of a minefield as to what you can and can't do with FTTC and EoFTTC connections. We pioneered EoFTTC for one of our carrier partners and I'm so glad we did. It's an excellent product and well worth paying a bit more for. It even gives you things like a slightly larger MTU size so we can run full VPLS over it where as you can't with standard FTTC. Also EoFTTC comes with a much higher support level than standard FTTC connections.

 

Send me a PM or put some more questions on here if I can help at all.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[Oaktech]

We've been on a BT FTTC and it was OK. Latency was noticeably higher than the leased line, but it was generally OK, we're a mixed 3-4 form entry junior school with just under 400 pupils and about 150 devices.

 

Given the option I would stay on a leased line but you know, money talks so start looking around.

[SchoolsBroadband]

I'd normally recommend a leased line when you're above 300 pupils and you've a reliance on IT to help deliver lessons. Particularly if you do any kind of tablet rollouts.

 

Leased lines are much more affordable than they once were. For primary schools we can now do a 100Mbit leased line to the majority of the country for the equivalent of £375pm with a one off install cost which is pretty damn good considering what the prices were 3 years ago.

 

Dave

[sparkeh]

Personally I think that EoFTTC is a good option for mid to large primaries.

You get a dedicated line line and better SLA. Yes it's a bit more expensive than FTTC but cheaper than a leased line and worth it.

[Wave9_Lee]

Hi Owen,

 

Echo what others have said - EoFttC > Business FttC, but money talks. Although if you are on a leased line today and want to step down to EoFttC, then the school will be making a saving on current levels. It perhaps doesn't make sense to go to the cheapest option - after all, once future budgets are set at the new low level and you want to increase/upgrade, you might find it harder to get access to the funds. I'd be happy to provide a quote if you're interested.

 

If you just need a managed web filtering and security service as an add-on, I'd be pleased to quote for that too.

 

regards

 

Lee

[Wave9_Lee]

Ref Backup - just noticed this thread from 3 days ago...

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/internet-related-filtering-firewall/175913-virgin-business-internet-down-birmingham-you-too.html

[Opendium_Steve]

Yep, if someone puts a digger through your fibre, your internet is going down, SLA or no.

 

Ideally a backup line should take a different physical route too (but that's not always possible)

[GrumbleDook]

Yep, if someone puts a digger through your fibre, your internet is going down, SLA or no.

 

Ideally a backup line should take a different physical route too (but that's not always possible)

 

And the number of folk that used to moan about the extra cost of RBCs because they had relisience and redundancy built-in ...

[Opendium_Steve]

And the number of folk that used to moan about the extra cost of RBCs because they had relisience and redundancy built-in ...

 

I'm certainly not saying that everyone needs a backup line, but pros and cons do need to be weighed up realistically instead of just saying "we have an SLA" and pretending that this somehow magically means no one will put a digger through your fibre.

 

SLAs spell out what level of service the provider _aims_ to give you, and how they will compensate you if they fail - there are situations where they fail and the compensation the SLA says you'll get pretty much never comes close to actually compensating for the level of disruption it causes.

 

The "cloud services" era is causing a lot of folks to shift services out to the cloud because it's cheaper, and in my experience there's normally next to no consideration for what is going to happen if the internet connection dies - again, I'm not saying that moving stuff out to the cloud is wrong, but any cost savings made there do need to be weighed up realistically.

[sparkeh]

And the number of folk that used to moan about the extra cost of RBCs because they had relisience and redundancy built-in ...

Funny, our RBC connection with redundancy went down a few times, our non RBC ISPs EoFTTC without redundancy has never failed. And is significantly cheaper