Schools Broadband or RM Broadband?

[paulellam]

RM here, no problems for years either.

[SchoolsBroadband]

Thanks Dave - We've got someone from Schools Broadband coming out on Monday for a chat and a conversation about hosted/onsite Lightspeed will be one of the discussion topics.

 

FYI if you're part of a MAT you could always put your Lightspeed Rocket in our Data centre, MPLS / VPLS all schools back into a Virtual firewall and have full control of your rocket.

 

We tend to see only the bigger MAT's doing this but it can work out very nicely and give a lot of flexibility including the option to put your own servers into our dedicated co-location and have their resources shared across all schools. Alternatively if you do a lot of Azure we can even get you your own dedicated Microsoft Expressroute connection.

 

Dave

[AlanD]

Every time I see school debating a school internet connection - they always seem to be using leased lines. I can't understand what they require the upload bandwidth for. I've looked time and time again at our traffic graphs and our upload speed is always well under 10Mb/s (usually under 1Mb/s) and nobody complains about the speed with a potentially contended FTTC line at 80Mb/s. In fact we have a 200Mb/s Virgin cable (again a contended asymmetric line) for redundancy and load sharing...and both together they are 1/10th of the cost of a leased line. And yes we use both Office 365 and google docs. No doubt those same schools will be complaining about the lack of budget for ICT stuff. I can understand that in the early days with ADSL a school needed a dedicated leased line, but that is really not true any longer as far as I can tell. And before someone mentions it contention is barely noticeable, rarely any impact during office hours (yes it can be 20% in the evenings...but still liveable with when needed for night school etc)

[localzuk]

Every time I see school debating a school internet connection - they always seem to be using leased lines. I can't understand what they require the upload bandwidth for. I've looked time and time again at our traffic graphs and our upload speed is always well under 10Mb/s (usually under 1Mb/s) and nobody complains about the speed with a potentially contended FTTC line at 80Mb/s. In fact we have a 200Mb/s Virgin cable (again a contended asymmetric line) for redundancy and load sharing...and both together they are 1/10th of the cost of a leased line. And yes we use both Office 365 and google docs. No doubt those same schools will be complaining about the lack of budget for ICT stuff. I can understand that in the early days with ADSL a school needed a dedicated leased line, but that is really not true any longer as far as I can tell. And before someone mentions it contention is barely noticeable, rarely any impact during office hours (yes it can be 20% in the evenings...but still liveable with when needed for night school etc)

It really depends on the school. We have a 200Mbps leased line at our central site, and we use the upload very well (as we are the central site on a WAN). Our smaller schools have FTTC.

 

However, some areas can't get FTTC. A lot of areas can't get cable. So, in a lot of areas the choice is leased line or ADSL. So, a lot of the time it isn't about the upload - its the only way to get the download.

 

Also, whilst you are happy with your contended line, other areas don't get off so lightly - contended lines can mean slow speeds - a 1:1 contention ratio means guaranteed bandwidth. When you've got so much reliance on your connection, it seems unwise to go for anything but a proper business connection.

[MartinT]

SchoolsBroadband if you wanted a fully filtered service. We've got a 200M Exponential-e leased line and a Smoothwall as we do it all ourselves.

 

I wouldn't touch RM, ever.

[JonThompson]

We use Virgin Media with onsite Lightspeed Bottle Rocket and a Fortigate Firewall. We bought the rocket as part of BSF implementation, but only bought the Fortigard last summer. We'd had VM as a backup line for a few years and used to use emPSN as our primary, but have since switched to a 1GB bearer throttled to 200meg with VM as a primary and a FTTC emPSN line as a lifeboat connection.

Our Fortigard was configured by a company called Switchshop who we use for network configuration. They are device and vendor agnostic, and offer really good advice. http://www.switchshop.co.uk

[snagrat]

SWGfL (who use RM) seem to sell shared leased lines now. I queried one of their quotes for a leased line as it was worded as "up to" 20/100. I queried the "up to" being as a leased line should be the full 20.

 

I didn't really get a definitive answer. Still Schools Broadband came in with a 100/100 quote for £2k less pa so we binned SWGfL.

 

Done this in a few schools now.

[SchoolsBroadband]

BT Wholesale offer a contended leased line service. It's about 25% cheaper (from what I recall) than a 1:1 contention ratio but allows isps to offer the up to service on leased lines.

 

We don't offer this service though and only do 1:1 leased line services.

 

We are seeing increased bandwidth demand and we'll continue to see it go up and up. 3 years ago people went from leased lines to fttx. Now we're seeing them go back to leased lines.

 

And when 4k TV starts coming along in earnest we'll see an even bigger shift for bigger bandwidths with secondary schools.

 

Dave

[MartinT]

Exponential-e. Zero contention, zero downtime in the last year. Excellent managed service.