Renewal time for our leased line

[AlanD]

Virgin and plus net who we are with both claim not to restrict any traffic during the day time. Typically, ISPs don't need to shape traffic until the evening...when iPlayer, Netflix etc start to soak up capacity. We certainly see very little sign of any impact on the maximum advertised rates.

[ajevanu2]

Hi,

We are currently going through the same process in a school in Wolverhampton. We currently have a 50mbps leased line through our local IT support partner because we can't get FTTC in our area. We are still in the process of sorting things out, but bear in mind the installation costs as you may find a 3-5k bill for them installing a leased line. Thought I would be able to renew and it would be cheaper, but sadly its not the case.

 

Digging up the road again is cheaper....

 

PM me if you want more info on local providers costs etc.

[AlanD]

I keep coming back to this. Are you really sure you need a leased line? If you can get Virgin - I am guessing their Async service at 200Mb/s (or 300Mb/s) with a 15Mb/s will be just fine....certainly is for us as a (yes smaller) secondary school....Take a look at you bandwidth usage. No - if you have remote Active directory servers or something, or cloud backup it might not be enough but otherwise you'll probably find webrowsing and downloads much faster - we certainly do.

[Katy]

I've just had a quote from Lloyds IP (reselling Gamma) and for 100Mbps it's come in at £250/month cheaper than Virgin 100Mbps (Virgin's price was the cheapest by far when we first went out to tender in 2014, although they now want to put the price up despite everyone else dropping it). Our Virgin comes in over Openreach fibre as we're not in a Virgin area (so the standard cable modem option is not available) but so long as you have sufficient fibre already blown in you should be able to avoid any installation fees.

 

We use a Gamma FTTC line for our SIP calls (and Gamma SIP trunks) and have had no problems at all with those.

Virgin we have had one small bit of downtime but it was over a weekend and quickly fixed, however they are awful to deal with (they billed us for price increases despite us still being under minimum contract - took 2 months to get them to reverse and credit back the account. We're also 2 years into a 3 year contract and I've never spoken to the "dedicated account manager" and also not been given a login to their management platform yet despite asking multiple times)

[AlanD]

You use a separate line for SIP???!! Clearly money is no object for some schools.

[localzuk]

You use a separate line for SIP???!! Clearly money is no object for some schools.

Its the method some suppliers recommend to do things. I know of one SIP supplier who won't sell their service without providing their own line also.

[Achandler]

We currently use approxiamtely 80% of our leased line virtually all day everyday.

 

The daytime caused by staff and students, but come 18:00 backups start being sent offsite amongts other things, like OneDrive syncs etc. So we have increased our Leased Line this time. I looked at alternatives and currently there is limited options for us but a leased line.

[sultan966]

Hi Mikkydoos,

 

Regarding filtering why don't you do it yourself? It will save you money. I have done it at my school and we are in Birmingham as well. It is very easy to setup a firewall and web filtering. You will have to pay license fee around £300 a year. I used Cisco ASA firewall. Cisco has a product called Sourcefire (another name FirePower) which comes as bundle with Firewall. Few configurations and you are ready to go. Cisco bought the Soucefire company for web filtering. It is in my opinion the best.

 

If you go this path you will save filtering cost. I had quotes from Smoothwall and Sophos and they were expensive. So, I decided to go Cisco path. Cheap and the best.

Edited January 27, 2017 by sultan966

[synaesthesia]

You can't compare Sourcefire's solution with Smoothwall or Sophos, it's not nearly half as capable, and does not stand up to modern requirements for safeguarding and PREVENT duties. Frankly you'd be better off using PfSense on it's own with the free Smoothwall perhaps - it costs nothing, more capable than Sourcefire's offerings but still not really an ideal solution!

[sultan966]

Regarding leased line: I think you are running out of time. If you change provider they will have to install fibre cable which will cost £2500. You also need lead time of 3 to 4 months minimum.

[Katy]

You use a separate line for SIP???!! Clearly money is no object for some schools.

You can't get QoS set on a Virgin leased line for SIP provided by a different provider. £46/month for FTTC plus the SIP trunk rentals is still cheaper than the rental on the ISDN30e it is replacing.

Once we replace the Virgin with a Gamma leased line there will be no need for a separate line.

[AlanD]

...but if its a leased line - you are guaranteed the bandwidth....I would have thought you just need to make sure your gateway router has QOS - or a dedicated 10Mb/s (or even 5Mb/s) set aside for SIP by setting a limit on your other bandwidth use of 90Mb/s or whatever.

[Katy]

You're not guaranteed it once it leaves Virgin's network and finds its way through to Gamma, gateway router is managed by Virgin and good luck getting them to set that up. Either way it's still cheaper than ISDN and it's only there for a year or two until we move the leased line over to Gamma.

[SchoolsBroadband]

We can offer end to end QOS into Gamma. Your ISP just needs to have a private interconnect into them.

 

Dave

[SchoolsBroadband]

Regarding leased line: I think you are running out of time. If you change provider they will have to install fibre cable which will cost £2500. You also need lead time of 3 to 4 months minimum.

 

You'd be surprised with BT's new quick win policy we've had some new leased line installs in and working in only 10 days!

[mikkydoos]

You can't compare Sourcefire's solution with Smoothwall or Sophos, it's not nearly half as capable, and does not stand up to modern requirements for safeguarding and PREVENT duties. Frankly you'd be better off using PfSense on it's own with the free Smoothwall perhaps - it costs nothing, more capable than Sourcefire's offerings but still not really an ideal solution!

 

@sultan966 That!