Schools Broadband - Anyone else having Internet issues today?

[Primus]

We have had our Internet provided by Virgin Media for years and years now, originally 100mb/1gb and now 1gb/1gb - at no point have we ever had throughput issues.

 

Sure there's been occasional downtime - usually related to people in diggers going through cables but if an ISP cannot maintain reasonable speeds for customers by balancing load to prevent the kinds of problems SB customers are having then there's something seriously wrong.

 

In addition if a company did have problems you'd expect them to get a grip on it, however we have customers of SB on this very thread saying it's been like this for years.

 

Obviously no ISP is going to be able to sell lines at a reasonable price that are completely uncontended beyond the ISP, however to suggest that some schools are hammering the bandwidth and this therefore reduces other schools to very very slow speeds is quite frankly ridiculous.

[Katy]

Obviously no ISP is going to be able to sell lines at a reasonable price that are completely uncontended beyond the ISP, however to suggest that some schools are hammering the bandwidth and this therefore reduces other schools to very very slow speeds is quite frankly ridiculous.

From what I've understood the problem is they provide content filtering (Lightspeed) as part of the package, so the slowness is running tens of Gbps through a Lightspeed cluster. We used to have a central filtering system in our trust (everyone had MPLS back to the data centre then a shared filtering platform then out to the Internet), slowed down when other schools were hammering it.

 

I'm not excusing the problems at all but I don't feel its a like for like comparison against something like a standard leased line.

 

(I'm not a customer, we have a Virgin (soon to be Gamma) leased line and we have our own on site smoothwall filtering so this may all be incorrect but it's just what I've gathered from reading through the thread)

[FN-GM]

Erm ... that is something Virgin have tried with me over the last year ... they were interesting conversations, including them trying to get me to pay for a premium technical service because I like to run my SuperHub in Modem mode and run my own network ... apparently they don't support that.

 

I was referring to Virgin business connections, IE like for like. Still doesn't make it ok though.

 

They have clearly sold more bandwidth than they can provide. Maybe acceptable for a home connection. Not for a business/school connection.

Edited November 22, 2017 by FN-GM

[Primus]

From what I've understood the problem is they provide content filtering (Lightspeed) as part of the package, so the slowness is running tens of Gbps through a Lightspeed cluster. We used to have a central filtering system in our trust (everyone had MPLS back to the data centre then a shared filtering platform then out to the Internet), slowed down when other schools were hammering it.

 

I'm not excusing the problems at all but I don't feel its a like for like comparison against something like a standard leased line.

 

(I'm not a customer, we have a Virgin (soon to be Gamma) leased line and we have our own on site smoothwall filtering so this may all be incorrect but it's just what I've gathered from reading through the thread)

 

It's their job to spec hardware and software that will do the job required - it's perfectly possible to have shared filtering etc. without these issues.

[Spence_101]

Third time this week we've had a whole internet outage.

[PrimaryNetMan]

Looks like Filter 20 has thrown it's toys out of the pram this morning.

[Fazza]

Third time this week we've had a whole internet outage.

 

We've never really had a full outage, just very slow speeds - at the moment we're using about 60Mbps but only have 12Mbps free on a 200Mbps so I guess we have some things to be grateful for.

[IrritableTech]

I don't think it is particularly helpful to Schools Broadband or its customers when people who aren't or never have been connected through Schools Broadband throw in their 2p. As has been previously mentioned we need to ensure we are comparing apples with apples. Schools using the Schools Broadbands hosted services can't be compared with schools who run their own filtering and firewalls, or residential customers sitting behind their ISPs rebranded netgear router from 2009.

 

We use Schools Broadband across our MAT. Schools are connected via various filter groups so I get to see first hand the issues and I'm generally the first point of complaint from the staff in remote sites - I guess that's an occupational hazard when you were the one proving best value last time the contract came round. I'm aware of the issues over the last week or so, and I'm also aware of the improvement in the last couple of days.

 

As a manager in a support department I know both the difficulties we suffer when a suppliers service has issues, but I also know what it is like when a service I'm responsible for has issues too. Let's cut these people some slack shall we before bad mouthing them in a public forum. It can have more long lasting effects than perhaps anyone intended.

 

Schools Broadband have signed up for a solution with an external company on the promises of high quality solution for an affordable price. Sound familiar? They're in a very similar situation to ourselves. It sound like they are actively pursuing alternatives but unfortunately as we all know contracts take time to expire and new solutions take time to develop.

[SchoolsBroadband]

Looks like Filter 20 has thrown it's toys out of the pram this morning.

 

Yes we've had a certain school been ddos'd 3 times in 3 days which sits on filter 20 with over 20Gbit thrown at them each time. This is normally fixed within 5 minutes but this time filter 20 decided to crash and had to be rebooted. The school are investigating their internal systems as we're sure it's being instigated from inside their network.

 

We've a lot going on in the background which we'll update everyone on shortly in due course.

 

 

Dave

[Primus]

I don't think it is particularly helpful to Schools Broadband or its customers when people who aren't or never have been connected through Schools Broadband throw in their 2p. As has been previously mentioned we need to ensure we are comparing apples with apples. Schools using the Schools Broadbands hosted services can't be compared with schools who run their own filtering and firewalls, or residential customers sitting behind their ISPs rebranded netgear router from 2009.

 

We use Schools Broadband across our MAT. Schools are connected via various filter groups so I get to see first hand the issues and I'm generally the first point of complaint from the staff in remote sites - I guess that's an occupational hazard when you were the one proving best value last time the contract came round. I'm aware of the issues over the last week or so, and I'm also aware of the improvement in the last couple of days.

 

As a manager in a support department I know both the difficulties we suffer when a suppliers service has issues, but I also know what it is like when a service I'm responsible for has issues too. Let's cut these people some slack shall we before bad mouthing them in a public forum. It can have more long lasting effects than perhaps anyone intended.

 

Schools Broadband have signed up for a solution with an external company on the promises of high quality solution for an affordable price. Sound familiar? They're in a very similar situation to ourselves. It sound like they are actively pursuing alternatives but unfortunately as we all know contracts take time to expire and new solutions take time to develop.

 

I think what you have to understand is that there are many schools who use SB and have a substandard service, SB are making excuses that don't add up and those of us who know this are chipping in.

 

Schools who have hosted firewalls and filtering have broadly the same needs as schools who host their own - ie. a functioning Internet connection at a reasonable speed such as the package they have chosen.

 

SB sell services based on them being leased lines with particular service levels (for the schools we are talking about here). They have then implemented something which does not perform adequately.

 

Cutting people slack is all well and good but this is a company deriving a profit from tax payers whilst offering a substandard service over an extended period of time.

 

If schools considering SB see these threads and avoid them as a business then that's to be expected and completely understandable.

 

In short they're not in a similar situation to schools at all, they're meant to be experts in what they do and they're charging schools for their service - they are still offering advice to people on here about technical solutions for UTMs etc when their own house isn't in order!

[Edu-IT]

There are many schools who have great service too. They just don’t shout about it. That is the same across the board, generally.

 

Have you considered that they may have been sold a filtering solution on the understanding that it can handle the amount of traffic they’re dealing with, but then been let down when it actually comes to it, so are forced to implement a new solution? Nobody knows whether this is actually the case but its entirely possible.

 

There’s no evidence to suggest that SchoolsBroadband are putting their profits first and service quality second so I do feel its unfair to imply such.

[synaesthesia]

I agree with @Edu-IT. Whilst things haven't been smooth sailing for us, we've always tried to be fair. I don't believe it's fair to say they are putting profits over anything else other than obviously understanding a business needs to make money to work. Regardless, we've seen them improve massively over the years, gone through good times and bad alike. We were instrumental in getting their service in a large number of schools when EMBC kicked the bucket and can certainly remember things being vastly better when the filtering was done by Fortigate; whether that was a capacity thing or not we don't know, and we know Fortigate wasn't providing an adequate enough filter as things moved forward. Easy to negate bottlenecks then.

SB were growing quickly after that and we remembered when they put Lightspeed on the table. It looked promising, they had many options open to them and if we were in the same position we'd have probably looked at Lightspeed too.

 

So we're here now after a long period of issues, the vast majority of which have been down to Lightspeed's apparent lack of scalability. There have been core issues unrelated to filtering, if my memory serves me correctly a couple of the bigger ones were down to Fortinet setup issues (feel free to correct me if wrong, @SchoolsBroadband!) and a couple of instances of large DDOS attacks. The latter couldn't be helped, and the former down to a good infrastructure needing Fortinet's own engineers to look into it. Forti is one of the biggest players in the market; certainly from everyone we've been speaking to over the last few weeks the majority of them use Fortinet hardware.

 

From the point of view from many smaller schools especially it will be difficult for them to fully understand these difficulties and will likely be held against them when it comes to renewal, but my advice will always be the same to them. Yes they've had issues, they are taking steps to improve them. Most of the issues they've had can affect anyone. We've seen plenty of threads on these exact forums where whole RBC's have had issues for one reason or another but it often feels as if people are more accepting of those failures even when there's 3rd parties involved. Maybe the issues may not have been exaggerated so much had @SchoolsBroadband chosen to hide away from them on here and maintain a non-community based presence like those RBCs however many of us appreciate their candour.

[GrumbleDook]

Off-topic but ....

We were instrumental in getting their service in a large number of schools when EMBC kicked the bucket

Yay! Someone is finally taking the fall for it!

(Btw, Embc didn’t kick the bucket, the LA did not buy a contract on behalf of schools and instead helped schools make their own choices)

[sister_annex]

There are many schools who have great service too. They just don’t shout about it.

 

This!

 

We signed up to SBB just over a year ago and after a few niggles and a complete IP change on our network we have had very few to no issues at all; speed has been consistent and filtering has been ok, we do get the 'network hardware issues' box on the odd webpages but overall service has been great and we here have little to complain about.

 

Like already mentioned by another, I do find it quite disconcerting when people who are not involved with SBB or use their services chime in and openly lambast them for something when the information they have presents only one side of the argument.

 

[PotNoodleTech]

(Btw, Embc didn’t kick the bucket, the LA did not buy a contract on behalf of schools and instead helped schools make their own choices)

 

But .... but.... how can the LA ensure value for money if you are not using a monolithic framework that's already out of date the moment it's agreed?

[GrumbleDook]

But .... but.... how can the LA ensure value for money if you are not using a monolithic framework that's already out of date the moment it's agreed?

 

By ensuring investment to keep improving it.

[Primus]

To be fair it was the people who are actually using their products who are complaining.

 

Clearly there are a fair few schools who are unhappy and seem to be experiencing very poor service.

 

Others have only commented when the excuses coming from SB are poor.

 

It's interesting that they're blaming shared filtering yet some customers are fine.

[lmrogers]

I actually signed a contract with SchoolsBroadband earlier this year even after reading a lot on this thread. I have been more than happy with their services and their customer service. Okay the internet speeds may have been a bit slow at times but no product will be perfect 100% of the time. I have found that the SchoolsBroadband support desk have been helpful and I am very satisfied with their service.

[HBPS]

Likewise been with them for years no real issues support is usually brilliant and i have been a reference for my previous account manager on several occasions

[Shadow_Walker]

To be fair it was the people who are actually using their products who are complaining.

 

Clearly there are a fair few schools who are unhappy and seem to be experiencing very poor service.

 

Others have only commented when the excuses coming from SB are poor.

 

It's interesting that they're blaming shared filtering yet some customers are fine.

 

I use SB in 3 of my schools in our trust. Yes 1 has had issues this week with maxing out it's line but it was fixed within a day or two. Yes they may not be perfect but every time i ring up support are great. Speaking with our account manager he said it was lightspeed not scaling well which causes them headaches.

[Edu-IT]

My turn! Any problems this morning?

[ful56_uk]

we are down too

[synaesthesia]

Down at 5 sites here. Getting bad when there's very little element of surprise when I phone round the schools to check & warn them!

[Edu-IT]

Can’t get through to CTS either. They must be slammed. Would be better if they issued a bulletin promptly.

[SchoolsBroadband]

Morning All,

 

Talk talk have a major service outage affecting all leased lines, eofttc, adsl and fttc circuits over all 1gbit interconnects in telecity hex.

 

A faulty line card has been identified and an engineer is enroute to stop out.

 

Our 10gbit interconnects into talk talk are not affected.

 

All dsl and fttc backups if your school has them are via BT wholesale so should function as designed.

 

We will keep you updated.

 

Dave