Schools Broadband issues

[Cazale]

- Someone internally is using all the bandwidth

 

If you suspect it isn't (or is!) this, install MRTG. It graphs bandwidth use (and pretty much anything else you want it to monitor): MRTG - The MRTG 2.17.4 Windows Installation Guide

 

It should also give you pretty reliable historic data for throughput issues.

Edited December 15, 2016 by Cazale

[Primus]

Schools Broadband seem to have had so many different issues, it's becoming a bit of a joke, they've got a whack-a-mole situation and their customers are really suffering.

 

I wonder which school will be the first to push a breach of contract legal action?

[SchoolsBroadband]

@Primus

 

I think I'd like to invite you to meet our teams in our offices and see what we are doing to solve some of the current issues and also how we cope with the many other ones which occur that nobody ever see's.

 

We had about 20 network managers visit us over the summer to meet the people on the front line and in the NOC departments and really see how we work, the tools we use and how we pro-actively mitigate many issues. We are certainly not a whack-a-mole company and do a great deal of work which unfortunately most people just never see (as it should be).

 

I'd happily ask anybody else that wanted to visit us to be our guests for the day too if you wish to send me a PM please do and I can get this organised as well as give some vendor accredited training for free too.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[Primus]

None of that matters if your service is up and down like a jack in the box. There's clearly some fundamental problems if you're experiencing so many many issues!

 

When I said whack-a-mole I meant no disrespect other than it's fix one problem and another appears.

[SchoolsBroadband]

ok well the offer still stands if you'd like to re-consider? Again though although some customers have some issues at the moment the huge majority do not and have not been affected by any of the issues reported on this thread as some people have said.

 

There is a lot going on in the background too which you'll hear more about in the not so distant future.

 

Dave

[Primus]

To be honest it's pointless, after the recent debacles there's no way I'd consider SB for anything in the future.

 

I'm also not sure you're getting just how many problems some of your customers have had - their service has been shocking and continues to be.

 

None of the stuff in the background matters or the many happy customers if you've got customers with so many issues as those posting on here have!

[snagrat]

ok well the offer still stands if you'd like to re-consider? Again though although some customers have some issues at the moment the huge majority do not and have not been affected by any of the issues reported on this thread as some people have said.

 

There is a lot going on in the background too which you'll hear more about in the not so distant future.

 

Dave

 

Dave, we have many customers who are with you and not having any issues at all. They are very happy and the service is great.

 

Do these customers get an invite as well? Are you chucking in a free lunch?

[SchoolsBroadband]

I certainly do see as we see the number of tickets we have for certain incidents, thats a rather sweeping and incorrect statement. We also speak to our customers and visit them too whenever we can.

 

Hence my offer to show you just what we are doing and how we run our operation. if you do not wish to use our services then I have no issue with that whatsoever and wish you well with whoever you do use. i do have issues with people saying sweeping and incorrect statements when all they read is what has been posted on here by people not knowing what is going on.

 

We deeply care about our customers and always try to go that extra mile. Sometimes things do go wrong and we are doing everything we can to fix those issues when they do.

 

I think I'll leave it at that @Primus as I do not wish to get in an argument....

[SchoolsBroadband]

Dave, we have many customers who are with you and not having any issues at all. They are very happy and the service is great.

 

Do these customers get an invite as well? Are you chucking in a free lunch?

 

Thanks @snagrat

 

Sure the more the merrier. I can organise another event and invite another 20 or so. There's never quite such a thing as a free lunch but I'd be happy to offer it

 

Thanks for your support. FYI The company @snagrat works for have used us for years and moved all their connections from another ISP over to us and have hardly had a problem in years. I certainly haven't paid or asked him to say the above!

 

Dave

[Primus]

@SchoolsBroadband how is what I've said sweeping or incorrect - some of your customers have had severe, repeated and frequent issues for an extended period of time and have already mentioned on this very thread they're looking into legal options to extricate themselves from their contract with SB.

 

You don't seem to care that much about the customers with these problems - all we're hearing from you right now is how many happy customers you have. But what are you doing to seriously address the huge failings in service for those customers who have and continued to be affected by a myriad of issues?

[elsiegee40]

Stepping in quickly. When speaking in this thread, I recommend that everyone only talks about their own direct experience.

 

Otherwise we end up in sweeping generalisation territory

[sippo]

It would be interesting to know the amount of customers who have actually made an official complaint, instead of slagging of a company on a public forum.

 

I could slag off many a company on here who a lot of people use, but I don't. There are worse companies out there who provide a worse service than schools broadband.

 

I think Schoolsbroadband need to be given a bit of slack. This is the first real issues our MAT have experienced in 5+ years.

[Steve21]

It would be interesting to know the amount of customers who have actually made an official complaint, instead of slagging of a company on a public forum.

 

Personally I'd disagree on this aspect. If a sponsor (and I mean generically as my case with Smoothwall or others with Impero etc) are using a public forum for their help/information etc, then there's no reason not to use that to respond or bring up issues. Just pick any other company like Vodafone/Virgin etc etc they all use their forums as a way to contact them too.

 

I also think it's nice that people raise issues on a public forum as it shows others who may be considering a service how it's acting (Whether from a "it's broke" or "they're dealing with it correctly" side).

 

Now before I get shot, there is obviously a difference to swearing etc at them, and talking/discussing properly obviously, but don't think it should be hidden away and I'm sure both sides would agree on this. Schoolsbroadband want to show people they are doing what they can to resolve it etc too remember

 

Steve

[synaesthesia]

A public forum is a good a place as any to raise awareness of an issue, see if others have similar issues, putting heads together etc. It's also a good place for the companies involved to put their point across, communicate to several people at the same time. I would sincerely hope that people who have a grievance have followed the correct procedures doing so, otherwise how could Schools Broadband possibly know where to start? If no official complaint or queries are made and then the school(s) start getting all legal, they wouldn't have a leg to stand on. SB have to protect their business interests but believe me (and them of course) first and foremost they want to help.

Quite rightly, SB could entirely pull their entire presence from Edugeek; there is no obligation to be here, to answer questions or take the flack. That's not who they want to be, they are striving to be personable, human and helpful. Despite the problems, I will defend them to the hilt as far as their communication and customer service goes.

[Blue_Cookeh]

It would be interesting to know the amount of customers who have actually made an official complaint, instead of slagging of a company on a public forum.

 

I could slag off many a company on here who a lot of people use, but I don't. There are worse companies out there who provide a worse service than schools broadband.

 

I think Schoolsbroadband need to be given a bit of slack. This is the first real issues our MAT have experienced in 5+ years.

 

I'd give them some slack if the first two times I complained through their official process SOMEONE replied to me. It took three attempts over a month to get any response, and it ended up being from David on this forum.

 

I will say their Technical desk on the phone/e-mail are top notch, they always pick up quickly and sort out what I'm after whilst still on the line (firewall changes etc), so I can't fault them for that. It's just the connection that seems to lack. It looks like it's been fairly good the past couple of weeks for us though.

 

I'd be interested to know what's coming soon™

Edited December 16, 2016 by Blue_Cookeh

[Fazza]

I'd give them some slack if the first two times I complained through their official process SOMEONE replied to me.

 

It took three attempts over a month to get any response, and it ended up being from David on this forum.

 

They've always struggled with emails - which for a telecoms company is a bit strange. From personal experiences, if you ring up for a website to be unblocked this gets treated as a higher priority than a high or critical priority that has been logged in writing (with screenshots) as an email as the easier jobs get done first and it feels like they sit on the harder ones (or maybe not enough 2nd or 3rd line people to deal with them, no idea.

[clockend25]

Hmm. Speed was back here this morning so assumed our move had been completed, but we're now seeing speeds of around 0.5MB across the site.

[Spence_101]

Aaaand our internet is fully down yet again.

[CyBeRkId2002]

Just had our third outage in three days. Unacceptable. To people saying downtime is inevitable - in a well managed redundant service it should not be. That's what we pay for and shouldn't expect any less!

 

And for those who are interested... Yes, we have made a number of formal complaints some of which have received responses, others not. We are currently awaiting a resolution to our latest complaint but as our account manager has passed our early termination of contract to a director (which I believe would be right considering the severity) who has in turn batted it right back to the account manager I get the feeling it could go on for some time. I believe we have no choice but getting the legal service we have involved.

 

I fully believe it's possible some people are receiving decent service from SchoolsBroadband, but with the number of people who are having issues and more importantly how people are saying they are being treated (first-hand, not word of mouth) would you really buy in to the service now?

[2ilent8cho]

Vote with your feet/wallet if not happy. Been 6 years with Zen, zero downtime during the day, a few 15 minute windows of planned maintenance, normally cisco router firmware update in early hours of the morning with notice of this given a few weeks in advance. Onsite Fortigate for filtering which i do the software updates on out of hours. Might cost more than most, but you get what you pay for, had many companies try and get us to move to them saying how cheap they are, but i will flat out not move from Zen with our Internet connection service trumps price, which is why we dumped the LEA broadband in the first place.

[Griff]

Guys what regions are you in? we are a non Schools Broadband school and we have had issues since this time last week with unstable internet, just wondering if this is more widespread than just SB.

 

We have had around 3 weeks total downtime since September and we are provided internet via our LEA Central Bedfordshire, they use Updata & E2BN costs us around 10 grand for a 100mb connection + extras. We just signed the documents to move to Exponential-e and Lightspeed on-site cannot come soon enough, I hope the grass is greener. We did look at SB but given the state of things there is no way we could get behind it not just from this forum but feedback from other schools on it. Really hope things improve for those schools having the trouble with it.

[Dom_]

We're in Yorkshire - it's not a regional issue though, the majority of our schools were unlucky enough to be put on Filter11, which has had nothing but trouble since it's creation (SBB configured it to Lightspeed's specification, which wasn't great by all accounts...). Hopefully the new filter platform they're putting in soon will eradicate the issues; we do have schools on other filters (3 & 17 I think) that have been completely unaffected by any of the issues, in fact the school on filter3 has been with SBB for around 6 years without a fault.

 

Without having the budget for onsite Lightspeed's I would still recommend SBB to my schools as I'm fairly confident it's only the Filter 11/12/13 cluster that is at fault (17 has been stable for the 3 schools that joined a few months ago).

 

I've always found first line approachable, been passed up to second/third when appropriate (although have had to pester a bit sometimes for this) and like being able to contact the directors directly (you don't get this with many companies).

 

It is bad the amount of downtime we've had, but our last provider (council) was as bad (in fact worse), at least SBB answer the phones and take the time to explain what steps they're putting in to preventing/resolving the issues as opposed to just rebooting the equipment and fobbing us off.

[Blue_Cookeh]

Guys what regions are you in? we are a non Schools Broadband school and we have had issues since this time last week with unstable internet, just wondering if this is more widespread than just SB.

 

We have had around 3 weeks total downtime since September and we are provided internet via our LEA Central Bedfordshire, they use Updata & E2BN costs us around 10 grand for a 100mb connection + extras. We just signed the documents to move to Exponential-e and Lightspeed on-site cannot come soon enough, I hope the grass is greener. We did look at SB but given the state of things there is no way we could get behind it not just from this forum but feedback from other schools on it. Really hope things improve for those schools having the trouble with it.

 

Also Bedfordshire, 0 problems on our backup line with Eclipse, lots of problems on our line with SB.

 

We used to be with the LA in Bedford BC and it was so so bad in terms of support, connection, response times etc. E2BN was just one of many issues we had.

Edited December 16, 2016 by Blue_Cookeh

[nathan]

I'd give them some slack if the first two times I complained through their official process SOMEONE replied to me. It took three attempts over a month to get any response, and it ended up being from David on this forum.

 

I will say their Technical desk on the phone/e-mail are top notch, they always pick up quickly and sort out what I'm after whilst still on the line (firewall changes etc), so I can't fault them for that. It's just the connection that seems to lack. It looks like it's been fairly good the past couple of weeks for us though.

 

I'd be interested to know what's coming soon™

 

Wondering if it's a dark fibre product?

[synaesthesia]

Don't think it is as I've not heard them offering it yet though. Exa are the only company we're aware of offering dark fiber, a very interesting solution.