Schools Broadband issues

[FN-GM]

Based on?

 

Ready my other posts.

[nathan]

This is really nothing to do with me, as I don't and have never used the service, however I will throw my short opinion in.

 

You signed up for a product, it seems it has continually had issues, what the business has or has not done to resolve the issue is pretty irrelevant. You pay for the product, it should be delivered.

 

I would ditch it as soon as possible. Business is business as they say. Most businesses don't act until they start losing customers.

 

Recently yes there have been a lot of issues but that hasn't always been the case.

[nathan]

I think this is a primary example of why datacenters shouldn't stick to one vendor, really.

 

But the majority do though don't they?

[2097]

Does no one here pay for a backup line that doesn't go through the fortigate ? , wouldn't that then give you a 100% uptime ?

You may say that it shouldn't be required, but any business that needs an internet connection should have a backup line.

Edited December 5, 2016 by 2097

[snagrat]

Does no one here pay for a backup line that doesn't go through the fortigate ? , wouldn't that then give you a 100% uptime ?

 

If it didn't go through Fortinet then you would probably have a different external IP which may break some systems.

 

Although a backup is good, if might not provide a backup service for all services and therefore could be pointless.

[2097]

Yep Correct, for a school like ours that everything is hosted internally the only problem we would have is website and external access . Our mail server will go down , but we could always have an external server as the 2nd MX record .

[FN-GM]

If it didn't go through Fortinet then you would probably have a different external IP which may break some systems.

 

You can keep the same public IP addresses if using BGP. Although if I recall SB doesn't support BGP, but could be wrong on that.

[synaesthesia]

Does no one here pay for a backup line that doesn't go through the fortigate ? , wouldn't that then give you a 100% uptime ?

You may say that it shouldn't be required, but any business that needs an internet connection should have a backup line.

 

We pay for a backup line and it goes through exactly the same systems at the other end. I believe that's something that should be looked into. However despite the issues with Fortigate ideally I'd like it to go through a fortigate system using fortinet's basic filtering setup to cover some bases, bypassing the Lightspeed setup.

[SchoolsBroadband]

We pay for a backup line and it goes through exactly the same systems at the other end. I believe that's something that should be looked into. However despite the issues with Fortigate ideally I'd like it to go through a fortigate system using fortinet's basic filtering setup to cover some bases, bypassing the Lightspeed setup.

 

Evening,

 

we do support BGP on our network (you need to if you are an ISP and have your own AS number).

 

You can put basic filtering on the Fortigate and also use Lightspeed, however this can cause issues particularly with HTTPS and we've also seen other problems when using some safe search functionality on certain search engines if you try to do it on two at the same time.

 

Backup lines come in via an alternate carrier and terminate on a different Cisco core router so this gives carrier resilience in the event one of them fail.

 

The Fortigates should fail over correctly in the event one fails and stops passing traffic (Although one of them wasn't in this particular issue due to a bug in FortiOS).

 

We can in certain situations segregate traffic so it doesn't even hit the Lightspeed boxes. Applications such as SIP are commonplace to do that with here as they don't need filtering and you can normally segregate your VoIP traffic by putting it on a separate VLAN on your LAN and extend this into the hosted Fortigates.

 

The Fortigate filtering is actually pretty good as a filter, just very complex for primary schools to use and setup and also without the additional of a Fortianalyzer or Forticloud service doesn't give you the reporting that Lightspeed does and in our opinion schools need.

 

Thank you for the supporting posts. We do a heck of a lot of testing as do our vendors and we generally follow their recommendations for FortiOS updates too. Normally applying a patch can take 3 months due to the knock on effects it could have. We're all more than annoyed with the issues we've just had in particular with Fortigate 3 and v5.2.8 of FortiOS. So far it looks like the upgrade to v5.2.10 has removed the crashes that were happening and not then instigating a failover scenario. We will continue to monitor though as it's not been a week yet since we've upgraded.

 

Dave

[synaesthesia]

Aye, we found the Fortigate filtering a bit too restrictive but would have no quarms failing over to it if need be. On a backup line use situation anyway it would be for the benefit of admin staff and services mostly and not students so it'd only be covering the safeguarding/staff protection aspects.

[sippo]

There are some right miserable sods on here. Some people like a moan.

 

We had 3 hours of downtime. The longest downtime from schools broadband in 5+ years of service across 8 schools. It couldn't be helped. Yes it was frustrating, yes it was an inconvenience, but life goes on. We had lots of services affected, and although a concern, we got through it...

 

I always say a good teacher will have a backup, and not rely on technology.

[synaesthesia]

Put yourself in the shoes of a teacher trying to deliver a lesson that starts as planned and then grinds to a halt because of a technological issue. There's 5-10 minutes of that teacher trying to figure out what the issue is themselves. They then escalate to the nearest means of support, be it the teacher in the room next door, the admin team, technical team. They then have to spend time investigating, and then when diagnosing a fault with the Internet, have to speak to their ISP. By the time it's gotten that far, it's often resolved itself or the lesson is over and truly disrupted. Agreed if staff come in at 08:00 to a note "No internet today" then no worries, they'll fall back to a backup or use intuition and crack on. Different thing entirely though.

 

Not just teachers. What about the schools who are trying to be paperless, the schools with many systems in "the cloud" or hosted centrally at an academy chain. What about those schools who's MIS is up there? Financial systems? Safeguarding systems? Schools where the single central record is hosted off-site. Those issues range from minor annoyances to major problems.

 

This isn't just us moaning - it's entire schools, academies, districts. We know it isn't acceptable. Schools Broadband knows it isn't acceptable and have publicly said so right here, even though they don't have to. A lot of this isn't about one large period of downtime, it's unreliability going back a bit further. We're not being miserable, we're looking out for the best interests of our schools and the people therein. Again, Schools Broadband agree with this, and why in the same breath I am one of these miserable sods moaning yet at the same time defending SB as much as is fair.

[sippo]

We were affected, teaching staff were affected. Everyone was affected. We have loads of cloud based services.

 

My feelings are that SB are getting a lot of stick for something they didn't plan, and did their utmost to fix. No I do not work for them, but I feel they deserve some credit. They are not a bad company at all, like some have made out.

[Griff]

We were affected, teaching staff were affected. Everyone was affected. We have loads of cloud based services.

 

My feelings are that SB are getting a lot of stick for something they didn't plan, and did their utmost to fix. No I do not work for them, but I feel they deserve some credit. They are not a bad company at all, like some have made out.

 

Welcome to working in the IT industry lol happens to me nearly daily

[FN-GM]

There are some right miserable sods on here. Some people like a moan.

 

We had 3 hours of downtime. The longest downtime from schools broadband in 5+ years of service across 8 schools. It couldn't be helped. Yes it was frustrating, yes it was an inconvenience, but life goes on. We had lots of services affected, and although a concern, we got through it...

 

I always say a good teacher will have a backup, and not rely on technology.

 

If only it was just 3 hours of downtime for us....

[Blue_Cookeh]

We were affected, teaching staff were affected. Everyone was affected. We have loads of cloud based services.

 

My feelings are that SB are getting a lot of stick for something they didn't plan, and did their utmost to fix. No I do not work for them, but I feel they deserve some credit. They are not a bad company at all, like some have made out.

 

So you're saying I shouldn't kick up a fuss for not getting the service we rightfully paid for? We were sold 99.9% uptime (or whatever the heck it is) and we haven't been given that. Would you be happy if you bought 8GB RAM but only received 6GB? You'd be pretty annoyed. Now magnify this to happening 4, 5, or even 6 times over the last few months, to multiple people.

 

I won't mention that the only person to actually talk to me has been David. Neither Carol nor our account manager got back to any e-mails I sent to them. Damn right I'm gonna moan, I recommended we move away from our LA to SchoolsBroadband and within 6 months of switching we've had more downtime than we had over 3 years. Now my management are asking questions and I look like the idiot for recommending we go for SB.

 

If only it was just 3 hours of downtime for us....

 

Agreed.

Edited December 8, 2016 by Blue_Cookeh

[nikaso]

So you're saying I shouldn't kick up a fuss for not getting the service we rightfully paid for? We were sold 99.9% uptime (or whatever the heck it is) and we haven't been given that. Would you be happy if you bought 8GB RAM but only received 6GB? You'd be pretty annoyed. Now magnify this to happening 4, 5, or even 6 times over the last few months, to multiple people..

 

I checked this very fact on Monday, the contract schools sign actually specifies 95% uptime, which equates to over an hour of downtime everyday. 95% uptime is actually stupidly low and means we don't as schools have an avenue to claim breach of contract on uptime unless the service falls off a cliff.

[Achandler]

The problem schools and businesses now face are naturally due to the increased in "needed" Internet. I know this is slightly off-topic.

 

Lessons are based on resources being available, email are all online now a lot of the time, there are people with online MIS systems (Progresso). There is a real question to be asked as to what value you place on having access to them all, and how much not having access to the Internet is actually an issue. It is a question I have raised here for our SLT to decide (as our leased line is up soon, not with schools broadband). We have had downtime, even 25 minutes of downtime recently caused much unnecessary chaos and moaning but still actually affects a lot of things.

 

The question I posed to them was simple, can the school cope without the Internet (unplanned loss) for the 6 hours in our SLA to get it fixed, should something happen. If it can't then we need to look at 2nd backup conenctions and not just an ADSL backup. If it can then we need to keep 1 line (probabaly boost the speed), if they don't think it can then we need to consider secondary lines, more and more things are ending up online now, in the last 3 years (during our current leased line agreement) we now have more things moved online from parental messaging, the setting of homework, parents evening bookings. The trend is one way and we have to try and plan for what's going to happen in the next 3 years, its a difficult task but I cna virtually guarantee people will want the Internet to be faster and never fail!

[mavhc]

Add a 9, double the cost, I guess, 99.9% costs 10x more than 99%, etc.

 

Problem is less that you can't work without the internet, it's that you can't without a lot of warning.

 

Achieved UK electricity transmission system reliability of 99.999998%. Can't find any data on reliability of electricity, apart from customers get about 1 period of downtime per year, though most is planned.

 

Wonder if any multi school groups have used their distributedness to improve internet reliability.

[Wubbalubbadub]

Anyone having speed issues today?

 

I have been getting from 0.5 - 15meg instead of the usual 85-100... 60-120 pings and 10 meg upload...

 

Phoned schools broadband and having a 5-15% packet loss problem apparently!

 

All i can do is laugh... Schools broadband, please just sort it out!

[synaesthesia]

No problems with speed & latency here today. Odd about the 95% in some people's contracts, none of the contracts we deal with are that low, it would never have been agreed to.

[nathan]

Anyone having speed issues today?

 

I have been getting from 0.5 - 15meg instead of the usual 85-100... 60-120 pings and 10 meg upload...

 

Phoned schools broadband and having a 5-15% packet loss problem apparently!

 

All i can do is laugh... Schools broadband, please just sort it out!

 

Nothing wrong with our 8 schools, You sure it's nothing internal?

[nathan]

No problems with speed & latency here today. Odd about the 95% in some people's contracts, none of the contracts we deal with are that low, it would never have been agreed to.

 

What connection are you on? i wonder if it's different based on if it's FTTC, EoFTTC or Leased

[synaesthesia]

100mbit on a gig bearer here and the primaries are EoFTTC.

 

The SLA from SB states the following:

 

Fibre LL - 99.95% target uptime with 2 hour MTT response, 5 hour repair

EoFTTC - 99.90% target uptime with 2 hour MTT response, 24 hour repair

There's no target uptime for FTTC or ADSL no doubt due to the other factors involved.

[localzuk]

100mbit on a gig bearer here and the primaries are EoFTTC.

The SLA from SB states the following:

Fibre LL - 99.95% target uptime with 2 hour MTT response, 5 hour repair

EoFTTC - 99.90% target uptime with 2 hour MTT response, 24 hour repair

There's no target uptime for FTTC or ADSL no doubt due to the other factors involved.

 

Do those SLAs cover the firewall and filtering side of it? As the lines, no doubt, have actually been fine.