Schools Broadband - experiences

[2097]

We are currently considering moving to Schools Broadband ( From BT ) and would love if any network managers that have implemented them into their schools could comment on this thread.

 

Ideally we would like to know about reliability , Failover to a backup line and general downtime . Another question is also the speed , any one using a 100mbit/200mbit connection getting close to the maximum speed ?

 

I have read the previous thread regarding the fortigate issues and Filter 11 . We wont be using their webfiltering so that should be a problem with us .

 

Many thanks

[FN-GM]

One of our primary schools has them. Its been shocking for the past 18 months. Constant downtime. I wouldn't have them if they are free. Its not just the filters that have been issues.

 

The rest of the schools use Zen Internet with Smoothwall. The internet connection has never gone down, even in the scheduled maintenance. This is also cheaper than Schools Broadband.

 

Have you seen this thread? - http://www.edugeek.net/forums/internet-related-filtering-firewall/176331-schools-broadband-issues.html

[2097]

Indeed i have and even queried regarding the downtime and if users had a backup line .

 

Does Zen offer DDOS protection as standard ?

[FN-GM]

Indeed i have and even queried regarding the downtime and if users had a backup line .

 

Does Zen offer DDOS protection as standard ?

 

It does. They have been doing lots of work recently increasing the protection level. Im not upto date with the latest though.

[mrwoberts]

+1 for Zen. Never had a problem. Called the tech support for equipment recommendations and they were excellent, very knowledgeable.

 

I ended up switching to them for my own home/office connection. I could definitely pay less elsewhere, but I'd rather have quality.

 

Just had a quote from Zen for a school locally that are unfortunately stuck with BT Unicorn for another 16 months paying thousands per year for an utterly useless service.

Zen said to buy into their Fibre Office unlimited pacakge, and to tell you the truth we are seriously considering it, even though it would mean we are paying twice for a service.

 

Business Line Rental / Zen Fibre Office Unlimited (upto 76Mbps) – Unlimited Usage

12 Month Contract with Zen Critical Care

Choice of 1 or 8 Static IP Addresses

Guaranteed Speeds of 60Mbps

24/7 UK Technical Support

SLA – 12 Hour Fix

 

Total Install charges - £84.00

Total Monthly Cost - £76.00

 

Recommended Hardware - https://www.zen.co.uk/smallerbusiness/superfast-fibre-and-broadband-packages/routers/

 

Zen Fibre Office will provide you with a business class SLA.

 

Edit: Not quite the 100+ Mbits you were after, but I'd contact them to see what they can offer you.

PM me if you want the contact details of the chap I'm dealing with.

Edited January 12, 2017 by mrwoberts

[AlanD]

Keep in mind ...that with all FFTC services everyone is at the mercy of Openreach. Twice we have had things fail and had outages of several days before Openreach could be persuaded to do a "lift and shift" in the cabinet - basically giving you a new connection. Doesn't really matter whether you are with PlusNet, Zen, BT, ...or anyone. Maybe some have better contention ratios. We use PlusNet - can't say we see much evidence of contention - whenever you run a speed test its pretty near the maximum. Still can't understand why some schools are stuck with 10Mb/s leased lines when you can get so much better with a broadband service.

[synaesthesia]

I've been very vocal about Schools Broadband, in both positive and negative lights over the past few years. I'm not entirely sure I would be able to recommend them at this particular moment in time however I am happy to say things are looking up.

I'll be a little vague as I'm not sure what I can or can't divulge from a recent meeting I've had with them with an academy trust. But, after the difficult times regarding reliability, we started stamping our feet quite loudly. The bursar was instructed to hold off payment until we could get an idea of where we were moving forward.

Sure enough we had a meeting with our local account manager and Bob Yorke, one of the MD's. They were very open with us about their failures and even more so about what they are doing to remedy it. I won't say too much about that bit, as that's really up to @SchoolsBroadband to do.

I will say this; we've had customer service issues previously where things stopped getting done in a timely fashion. They had outgrown themselves very quickly. A similar meeting was arranged with both MD's, technical chaps and the local account manager and again they were open enough to acknowledge the failings and what they were doing to fix it, going into detail about how their support team was growing already and where they planned to be in 6 months time.

They delivered exactly as they promised, and I'm happy to say their customer service has been excellent since.

Point being, I would be happy to say they are good at keeping their word. I wouldn't in all honesty be able to recommend their service until we've seen the evidence that their plans are working, however in the same breath I would not write them off.

[ninjafish]

I have just moved 2 Academies away from Schools Broadband. The sales side was great but the service was not great.

[TMBS]

We moved to them from KCOM last October and have had lots of issues. We have kept the same speed 100mbps/100mbps as previous but I regularly get 'page loading', we had lots of connection drops too. The worst ones were for a couple of hours but mostly for a couple of minutes which caused issues with some of our support companies.

 

The support has not been good. When I initially raised concerns that my support calls weren't being dealt with no one responded, I just kept on being fobbed off (I do now have the email of someone who answers my emails). When I withheld payment of the account because we were not receiving the service promised they threatened to cut us off. I'm being told that the issues are caused by us 'maxing' out our line, which I find hard to believe and their Traffic Reporting tool hasn't shown us going over 40mbps. They're very good at logging calls but I'm still waiting for a response to two I opened last week...

 

Needless to say we'll be moving when our contract is up.

 

Thanks

Tracey

[IrritableTech]

Well I'll throw our experience into the hat...I signed seven primaries and our high school up to another three years over the last summer break. All the schools felt the service and price proved best value compared to some other companies.

 

We monitor our internet connection with the dude. We upgraded to 200Mbit over a 1Gb barer over summer and we can happily hit 200Mbit if we like (three times this morning we've burst to that speed). We tend to hover around 70 these days with our normal browsing. In three and a half years Ican't remember our fibre going down - except on the upgrade. The majority of our primaries which have been on FTTC and now on EoFTTC and again, reliability of the connection has been excellent. We rarely need to speak with the service desk, but when we do they are helpful and ticket updates seem to come reasonably fast.

 

There has been some very unlucky customers which were both hit by the filter11 issues and the fortinet issues which followed. They are understandably upset about the whole thing. We are on some of their oldest clusters and we've not had many issues to complain about. However SB have held their hands up and our investing in their infrastructure and investigating other ways to improve the reliability of those areas.

 

If you're just looking for a pipe then schools broadband will be like any other reseller of a service I'd argue.

[SchoolsBroadband]

We moved to them from KCOM last October and have had lots of issues. We have kept the same speed 100mbps/100mbps as previous but I regularly get 'page loading', we had lots of connection drops too. The worst ones were for a couple of hours but mostly for a couple of minutes which caused issues with some of our support companies.

 

The support has not been good. When I initially raised concerns that my support calls weren't being dealt with no one responded, I just kept on being fobbed off (I do now have the email of someone who answers my emails). When I withheld payment of the account because we were not receiving the service promised they threatened to cut us off. I'm being told that the issues are caused by us 'maxing' out our line, which I find hard to believe and their Traffic Reporting tool hasn't shown us going over 40mbps. They're very good at logging calls but I'm still waiting for a response to two I opened last week...

 

Needless to say we'll be moving when our contract is up.

 

Thanks

Tracey

 

PM'd. Open tickets are at an all-time low at the moment so I'm surprised we're not getting back in a timely fashion. You should have your SLA which shows the escalation matrix of who to contact if you're not happy with someone.

 

The online graph in our portal does a 5 minute average (as is standard in the industry). We can also login to your router and do some live traffic stats which is what I've suspected our support department have done. We can send you screenshots of this to prove if you're maxing your line out too.

 

If you can reply to your PM i'll look into it personally for you.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[FN-GM]

PM'd. Open tickets are at an all-time low at the moment so I'm surprised we're not getting back in a timely fashion. You should have your SLA which shows the escalation matrix of who to contact if you're not happy with someone.

 

The online graph in our portal does a 5 minute average (as is standard in the industry). We can also login to your router and do some live traffic stats which is what I've suspected our support department have done. We can send you screenshots of this to prove if you're maxing your line out too.

 

If you can reply to your PM i'll look into it personally for you.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

I'm not surprised it's low. They get closed prematurely. For example staying stuff is sorted without checking.

 

I also asked a question about setting up a static route. I got "yes that's possible" and they closed the ticket.

 

Not helpful.

[SchoolsBroadband]

I'm not surprised it's low. They get closed prematurely. For example staying stuff is sorted without checking.

 

I also asked a question about setting up a static route. I got "yes that's possible" and they closed the ticket.

 

Not helpful.

 

Well that would be quite self defeating of us to do so as the ticket would just be re-opened again. We've a lot less tickets as we've had no major outages for quite some time.

 

We can of course setup a static route for you. You can also set one up on the Fortigate firewall if required too yourself (if your school has its own dedicated virtual firewall) if you reply to the case even if closed then it will automatically be re-opened. Alternatively send me a PM and I'll speak to the engineer in question personally and take up for you.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[FN-GM]

It is self defeating, but happens. I ended up doing the routing another way, it wasn't the best way but was easier than dealing with the support team.

 

It doesn't matter now anyway, less than 2 weeks and the line will be out.

[ItsOggy]

I always see a lot of ragging on SBB on here, it's a forum, people tend to share problems over positives, that's the nature of it.

 

I'm a SBB customer, be it without the filtering, we run our own filter.

 

Never had an issue with the connection uptime, support have always been responsive when I've had questions or asked for technical help.

 

Overall would happily recommend them.

[TMBS]

David has also PM me about this and is looking into our issues

[ChrisC]

We moved over to schools broadband from KCOM (DPSN) in April 2015 on a 100/100 FTTP leased line with our own smoothwall box for filtering.

 

Generally speed and reliability has been good. There was one time where there had been a mixup because we're on a direct line without lightspeed and something had been changed during an update on the router/firewall (MTU size was wrong) that cause a bit of trouble, but that was resolved pretty quickly.

I think the only other particularly noticeable downtime was when their core or some part of the network was hit with a DDOS attack (which was far more frequent when we were with SWGFL).

 

Their Network team, in particular Scott Caley, have always been really easy to work with and happy to talk through settings on the firewall to enable us to make any changes (within reason) rather than insisting we contact them every time to make simple changes etc.

 

As it stands I don't have any hesitation to stay with them when we come to renewal.

 

Chris

[nathan]

We have 12 primaries with SB now, other than the issues explained on here at the end of last year things have been good. It seems things are back to their normal reliability of pre late last year.

[SchoolsBroadband]

Thanks for the thumbs up @nathan and @ChrisC

 

Since it's inception over 5 years ago we've had less than 1 minute downtime on our core Cisco network.....

 

We get DDoS'd every other day and can soak most of them up. If we get a big one then this can normally be mitigated sub a couple of minutes as we're pretty quick at picking them up an dealing with them. Even then it doesn't effect everyone.

 

Dave

[Blue_Cookeh]

I'll be fair to SB, their filtering has been seemingly perfect for the past couple of months. As others have said, the connection was always rock solid

[synaesthesia]

I'll be fair to SB, their filtering has been seemingly perfect for the past couple of months. As others have said, the connection was always rock solid

 

Ditto, not missed a beat here since either at any of our sites.

[tinca492]

As one of the "affected customers" I presented schools broadband with a time limited action plan to improve reliability or plan for exiting contract.

 

They took this on-board, and since changing filter group away from Filter 11(first agreed action on plan) our service has been rock solid and noticeably faster. The initial performance/reliability period is nearly up and I am pleased to say that I am 100% with the outcome.

 

Only negative is that if they had moved us to another filter group when we first requested it we would have saved an awful lot of hassle.