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Schools Broadband issues

nicholab
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jertsy

jertsy

Posted
Posted
We've been lucky in that respect. Craig is always there if we need him; if anything the working relationship with that side of things has always been good.

 

How odd, it must just be us!

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Fazza

Fazza

Posted
Posted
We've been lucky in that respect. Craig is always there if we need him; if anything the working relationship with that side of things has always been good.

 

Craig is a great guy it's just the company that lets him and us lot down.

Blue_Cookeh

Blue_Cookeh

Posted
Posted

We had another 10 - 15 min outage this morning, the support phone message said it was due to a Lightspeed Rocket issue.

 

At this point I don't ever want to use Lightspeed again LOL, oh god :(

Griff

Griff

Posted
Posted
We had another 10 - 15 min outage this morning, the support phone message said it was due to a Lightspeed Rocket issue.

 

At this point I don't ever want to use Lightspeed again LOL, oh god :(

 

Put the Rocket on the school site bet you would get less issues ;)

SchoolsBroadband

SchoolsBroadband

Posted
Posted
The only recourse for downtime in the SLA is a service credit. I wish we could get away with such a lax SLA :)

"Sorry I'm hindering education, please accept £10 as an apology."

 

With respect @synaesthesia unlike most LA's and other providers we do actually pay service credits and this is dependant on the technology you use and how much you pay to use it when it's not working. I 100% understand the huge ramifications of when a school has no Internet (online registers, duty of care etc) but no ISP will open themselves to any consequential losses as if there is a big outage whether in their control or not then it could bankrupt them. We actually go over an above what our carrier partners pay us in the event of any issue. If our carriers offered us a better compensation scheme for not hitting SLA or downtime then we'd certainly pass that on. At the end of the day though on the whole all ISP's use BT or Virgin Media and we can only replicate what they offer us or offer slightly better without taking a huge risk to our business. Has anyone here ever had a service credit in cash from the LA? I highly doubt it.

 

Don't get me wrong though we never want to have to give out service credits and want everything 100% stable.

 

All I'll say at the moment is that there's likely to be some big changes coming in the not so distance future. I can't say any more than that at the moment. We are certainly not resting on our laurels.

 

Thanks for your continued support.

 

Dave

nathan

nathan

Posted
Posted
To be honest I'm completely fed up of SchoolsBroadband.

 

I was so happy to get away from our LA's terrible support, but at least their broadband didn't go down. Since signing up with SB in the last 6 months or so we've had plenty of downtime/issues, and whilst SB have sent status updates out via e-mail it a) doesn't make up for the failed service and b) makes me look like a fool for switching to them in school.

 

I wouldn't give a hoot during the holidays, but every time it goes down other people are telling me before I (who works off-site) knows, and before SB send anything out.

 

What also irks me is that I've complained to Carole (The service manager I think?), our account manager, and Dave ( @SchoolsBroadband; ) but no one has ever replied.

 

We have a simple FTTC line from Eclipse Internet for our SIP trunks (since SB couldn't get their own SIP trunks working through their Fortigate firewalls) which has seen better uptime.

 

Why dont you setup something like Zabbix to alert you when it goes down, you can set it up to monitor all sorts of things. Even set it up to send a text as an alert

rob101

rob101

Posted
Posted

We moved away this summer mainly due to the amount of down time SB has it was getting to be an joke and getting some very competitive costs. Our new provider Virgin has been stable as a rock once we got it up and running but the customer service is beyond dreadful, i still have complaint open from August and unresolved or acknowledged, our account manager changed and the new one has not even phoned to introduce them self, seems these days you can choose the smaller company's and get a personal touch with a smaller redundancy setup and more regular down time or a big company who will never know who you are or care but have a big system in place to make sure you always have a connection.

 

One thing i will give them is that they where always polite and tried hard to resolve issues as fast as possible and where honest when things went wrong, sadly this is not enough when the connection is down as much as it was and teaching and learning was suffering as a result.

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synaesthesia

synaesthesia

Posted
Posted

Certainly pains me to say anything bad about the guys at SB as I've had many a laugh, joke & chat with so many of their guys from CEOS, MDs, technical leads down to their helpdesk staff who as you say, have always been polite and efficient. You do have to look after the best interests of the school though, that's the most important part of it. I have all the time in the world for Dave and our account manager Craig but we have to be objective.

I do have a school with a Virgin connection and will echo what you've said about their service. The line is rock solid but trying to get anything done... :doh:

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fiza

fiza

Posted
Posted
Certainly pains me to say anything bad about the guys at SB as I've had many a laugh, joke & chat with so many of their guys from CEOS, MDs, technical leads down to their helpdesk staff who as you say, have always been polite and efficient. You do have to look after the best interests of the school though, that's the most important part of it. I have all the time in the world for Dave and our account manager Craig but we have to be objective.

I do have a school with a Virgin connection and will echo what you've said about their service. The line is rock solid but trying to get anything done... :doh:

 

Don't Virgin now partner with Trustnet which under the bonnet is LGfL?

IrritableTech

IrritableTech

Posted
Posted

We renewed this year across eight schools because we've all found the service to be good from schools broadband. We were affected by some down time last month with the aggregate router which isn't ideal but these things happen. We also had a hiccup with our upgrade a couple of weeks ago in the HT holiday, but an SB engineer was here the next morning and fixed the config error. I must also echo that our account manager Julia is very good, but I've also had dealings with many others within the business and have found them all to be very nice people.

 

In a way I think my schools have been a little lucky in that our rocket cluster does seem to have been a little more reliable than others. The luck of the draw but all clusters have been built and configured with Lightspeeds involvement at the time.

 

I think we've all got to remember what we are paying for. If you want a higher level of SLA, then it'll cost you. If you want to buy connectivity, a filter and a firewall from separate vendors and a good level of support - it'll cost you. You can have what ever you want, but you'll need to pay the going rate. The services which schools broadband provide are competitively priced. I ran a three month procurement exercise and found although on the surface other providers connectivity may have been cheaper, costs soon mounted up if you wanted to add in other services. Or the services being offered were no where near as comprehensive or tested.

 

I've got 1000 devices here at the high school and despite the work we put in there are always one or two of them playing up at any one time. Has anyone here not had a failure to deal with today?

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SchoolsBroadband

SchoolsBroadband

Posted
Posted

Thanks for the support all.

 

We've a lot going on in the background which at the moment is all I can say so watch this space.

 

We always do go that extra mile to help our customers and as per @IrritableTech mentions we are an all inclusive service and don't have any hidden costs many of our competitors do.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

winng

winng

Posted
Posted

We moved to SB on 1st November. We've had numerous issues including having to redefine our school network to match their WAN, i.e. restricted as to how many IP addresses we can have. Changes to subnets on all servers, switches, wireless, printers, etc. (the latter are still ongoing) has caused complete mayhem this past week!

 

As of today, SB have just 'fixed' the GPO which sends out the agent to all machines so hoping Internet will be restored shortly although I am still unable to access the 'allowed sites'.

 

Also lost remote access through changing external IP addresses. Remote access worked for two days but failed ever since!

 

Only just finding the time to bitch about the shoddy setup and breathe....... but we are still a long way from happy here.

Blue_Cookeh

Blue_Cookeh

Posted
Posted
We moved to SB on 1st November. We've had numerous issues including having to redefine our school network to match their WAN, i.e. restricted as to how many IP addresses we can have. Changes to subnets on all servers, switches, wireless, printers, etc. (the latter are still ongoing) has caused complete mayhem this past week.

 

I'll be fair to SB, they told me all of this before we signed up for anything, so it wasn't a problem. They also asked me roughly how long I think it would take and entirely worked to my schedule on readdressing everything.

 

Scott from their NOC went through the entire setup over the phone with me and didn't hang up until we were both happy we had connectivity and filtering was working appropriately.

 

As a network manager/IT technician/whatever you should have expected that from a company that's providing filtering/firewalling that's integrated with your on-prem devices/users.

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nathan

nathan

Posted
Posted
We've had a delay in getting our leased line in two schools activated but then again that isn't the fault of SB, it's our lovely friends over at BT. But i'll leave my gripes with BT to the other forum.
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winng

winng

Posted
Posted
Thanks to their management intervention, Scott was appointed to resolve our issues. It took just over an hour to bring us back online.
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tinca492

tinca492

Posted
Posted

majority of our problems have been the hosted Lightspeed (Filter 11). Have asked several times regarding an on site rocket as an option but this seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Have also requested changing us to a different filter group as others appear to be more stable. SB are very reluctant to do so.

 

Firewalling and remote access brilliant compared to LA.

 

Just opened a remote classroom in town and SB technical support have been absolutely great regarding extending our school network to it using EoFTTC. the solution was several thousand pound cheaper than other offerings, is rock solid, and means that all pupils share the same filter profiles etc

 

Just hope that the Internet reliability improves, it is difficult to know how sustainable the current situation is.

 

It would be nice to have a little more info on what the plans are that Dave hints at, could we not have an email as this forum is obviously not the right place to "announce" such plans.

 

kim

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SchoolsBroadband

SchoolsBroadband

Posted
Posted

Hi @tinca492,

 

thanks for the good comments ref the extension of your LAN. VPLS over our core network as standard allows this at no additional cost on installation and has saved our clients a lot of money.

 

Regarding an onsite Lightspeed Rocket, we can supply these but the licensing model is different. You'd need to pay for the physical server and then licences on a per user basis where as our hosted Lightspeed Rockets is no setup fee and a site licence for any primary or secondary school which saves schools a lot of money compared to putting devices on site.

 

if you'd prefer to go to an onsite Rocket then do let me or your account manager know and we'd be happy to help.

 

More info will be available in the not so distant future regarding plans :)

 

Thanks

 

Dave

tinca492

tinca492

Posted
Posted

Hi Dave,

I spoke too soon! issues with Filter11 cluster again this morning leading to outage. How do we arrange for someone to visit our site to discuss service stability issues and options moving forward?

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