Schools Broadband issues

[SchoolsBroadband]

Those setting can't be applied on a hosted lightspeed filter.

 

We might be able to set that up though. Let me pass it onto one of our product guys to take a look at and we'll get back to you.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[SchoolsBroadband]

@tinca492. Please contact your account manager or me if you get a slow response.

 

FYI filter 11 is having new hardware installed next week.

 

Dave

[nicholab]

HI Dave is there any update on whether Vimeo filtering can be offered on the hosted Lighspeed solution?

[synaesthesia]

And further downtime today. How much longer is it going to go on for? Is this acceptable? What is it going to take before someone pipes up and says "Right, we've had enough. Downtime credits don't cut the mustard; it's time for our legal team to go to town."?

[Primus]

Talk about bad publicity.......If it were me I'd be at least replying to people on here......

 

Schools Broadband now on our do not deal with list as a school.

[synaesthesia]

To be fair, they do reply; their communication is actually very good. Reliability however is a different story, and certainly not good when we're getting it in the neck from the schools.

[Primus]

They were replying to this thread regularly but haven't replied to the continuing issues today.

 

Smacks of having no answers.

 

As I said before, I would *never* use Schools Broadband as a result of the negative feedback from their customers on here.

 

Good comms are great but with an Internet connection what I really want is almost 100% uptime, the occasional issue is to be expected and understood but frequent downtime is completely unacceptable.

[Edu-IT]

Is this related to the Lightspeed filtering or a different issue?

[synaesthesia]

Filtering according to the automatic message when calling today. When it came back online, we had internet but absolutely no filtering for about 5 minutes, then the lightspeed box kicked back into life.

[Primus]

Are you saying you had completely unfiltered access for 5 minutes?

[Bob_the_Goon]

We were offline again too. The engineer phoned me to say that he didn't know what had happened to the Lightspeed box but it is now fixed. Guessing that they just rebooted all of their kit to get it working again.

 

They really need to sort this out otherwise we will be forced to seek an alternative. Shame because I really like the service when it is working, which admittedly is the vast majority of the time however that doesn't help the teacher(s) whose lessons have been ruined. Not good at all.

[SchoolsBroadband]

All,

 

No problem with Lightspeed at all. A Fortinet HA issue on one of the cluster with Fortinet TAC.

 

We are investigating and will report back asap as always.

 

Dave

[nathan]

They were replying to this thread regularly but haven't replied to the continuing issues today.

 

Smacks of having no answers.

 

As I said before, I would *never* use Schools Broadband as a result of the negative feedback from their customers on here.

 

Good comms are great but with an Internet connection what I really want is almost 100% uptime, the occasional issue is to be expected and understood but frequent downtime is completely unacceptable.

 

In fairness, this isn't really their official outlet so for people wanting answers they should contact them directly. In our 8 schools that SB is installed we haven't seen many issues once live, there were a few moments but it's been pretty stable. The trouble with feedback in public places is that the negative ones shout louder than the positive ones which doesn't always give you a true reflection of a service.

[Primus]

To be honest with so many people on here having regular issues it looks pretty bad. It's not just 1 user and it's not just an occasional problem. There are several users all having repeated problems over an extended time-frame.

 

It looks very bad.

[Blue_Cookeh]

The issues in this thread with SB generally always seem to be about Filter11 or a Fortigate cluster. Perhaps, as a service provider, if a specific set of hardware is causing continual issues then said hardware should be taken out of service?

 

I can understand downtime with broadband like this, or that equipment fails, but 5 measily minutes at home? fine. 5 minutes in a school lesson? Now that's really disruptive.

[lou-ashtonhurst]

Hi everyone

 

Just to let you know, we did replace the hardware we suspected to be problematic with Filter 11 last night in a scheduled maintenance window. As with any maintenance, this is now under close supervision by the NOC team.

 

While as standard we would not disclose information regarding major incidents in such a public forum, we do feel that given the severity of the situation everyone here does deserve some further information about what has happened, and what we are doing to resolve it.

 

Yesterday we experienced an issue with one of our Fortigate clusters, as part of which some of our customers will have experienced downtime of up to 20minutes. After investigation by our NOC team, we discovered a problem with the High Availability (HA) setup of the cluster. We already had a maintenance booked in for last night to replace the hardware associated with the Filter 11 cluster issues, and so we decided to complete the work at the same time. The maintenance completed in the early hours and we were not expecting further issues - but of course this, as always, remains under observation and review.

 

This afternoon we unexpectedly experienced a recurrence of the issue, and the HA for one of our Fortigate clusters failed. This wasn't expected, and we agree that is unacceptable. We collected all the information that Fortinet would require, and resolved the situation as quickly as we could. The situation is now escalated with Fortinet and we are working around the clock to get ensure we are all confident that this issue is fully resolved.

 

Both myself as NOC Manager and Mat (our Technical Director) are currently in close proximity to one of our main datacentres to resolve these issues as quickly and efficiently as we can. Please be assured, we are here and we are listening - many of you will have spoken to one or both of us and we want to be clear that those avenues of communication are always open (but please, we are working overnight over the next few days - please give us until at least 10am). We are returning calls when we can, however, datacentres are giant Faraday cages which does inhibit signal somewhat - it may be best to leave us a message either via VM or our CTS team, who are passing your concerns on.

 

If I haven't covered any of your specific concerns here, please do let me know.

 

Kind Regards

Lou Ashtonhurst

NOC Manager - Schools Broadband

Edited November 24, 2016 by lou-ashtonhurst

[SchoolsBroadband]

HI Dave is there any update on whether Vimeo filtering can be offered on the hosted Lighspeed solution?

 

Yes this is technically possible for us to do. I was speaking with one of our engineers this week and we need to make a customer category to do so. There are implications to other users though if we do allow Vimeo specific filtering as I believe some Vimeo may be a banned site by default due to some video's being inappropriate.

 

I'll get back to you in due course.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[ful56_uk]

Anyone with no internet at the movement?

[jertsy]

Anyone with no internet at the movement?

 

Ours went just now and the same yesterday at around this time. Seems to be back up now

[ful56_uk]

Just been told filter10 has an issue twice this week now

[fiza]

Our Primary Schools connection just went down. We are on filter 9

[ful56_uk]

We are on filter 9 but the guy said filter 10 is the issue

[synaesthesia]

Think that was a large scale outage today. All of my primary sites and my main secondary site were down.

[Primus]

Looks like a real quality service Schools Broadband are providing here...

[nathan]

Think that was a large scale outage today. All of my primary sites and my main secondary site were down.

 

we seem to be ok on filter 17