Schools Broadband - Anyone else having Internet issues today?

[Dom_]

Back on now

[nikaso]

A photo of Filter 11 has just been released.....

 

Edited February 7, 2018 by nikaso

[Fazza]

From a school's point of view, let's assume 87.6 hours downtime happened during the school day over the course of a year. Our finance ladies rely on RM Finance, which is a cloud-only product, so they've lost 87.6 hours worth of work.

 

Potentially yes, you could lose up to 87.6 hours of downtime if in your contract it says 99% uptime.

 

This why we have to pay special attention to the small print in the contracts.

 

The other thing to point out is that the 99% or 99.99% can be pretty meaningless in some cases as what happens when when it goes below the figure that is stipulated in your contract? In a lot of cases not a lot you just get an apology - others offer credits off your next bill. It's more of a target than a guarantee as you cant guarantee roadworks wont accidentally dig up and break your connection!

 

All you can do is look for recommendations from actual users when whoever your connection is with is up and take a gamble with another company who may be better or may be worse!

 

There are plenty of us who have had issues with SB over the years but we ourselves know/support other schools in the area that have never had any problems with them whatsoever but they dont go on internet forums each time everything is OK as you only do so when there is a problem so you tend to only hear from people who are having issues which can make the problems sound worse and more widespread than they actually are.

[synaesthesia]

Aaand it's down again. Joyous.

[Blue_Cookeh]

Potentially yes, you could lose up to 87.6 hours of downtime if in your contract it says 99% uptime.

 

This why we have to pay special attention to the small print in the contracts.

 

The other thing to point out is that the 99% or 99.99% can be pretty meaningless in some cases as what happens when when it goes below the figure that is stipulated in your contract? In a lot of cases not a lot you just get an apology - others offer credits off your next bill. It's more of a target than a guarantee as you cant guarantee roadworks wont accidentally dig up and break your connection!

 

All you can do is look for recommendations from actual users when whoever your connection is with is up and take a gamble with another company who may be better or may be worse!

 

There are plenty of us who have had issues with SB over the years but we ourselves know/support other schools in the area that have never had any problems with them whatsoever but they dont go on internet forums each time everything is OK as you only do so when there is a problem so you tend to only hear from people who are having issues which can make the problems sound worse and more widespread than they actually are.

 

I can appreciate there's only so much redundancy you can implement but at this point the company ought to be reaching out to customers and actively trying to repair their relationship with them.

 

I do understand what you're saying about those with problems complaining, but it's the same people over and over again. If the same people are all having the same problems time and time again do you not think this in it self is a problem? It's always a "small subset of customers" but they just so happen to always be the same customers - a bit of a coincidence, no?

[Bob_the_Goon]

Why is it always filter 11? I believe that filter's 12 and 13 are a subset of filter11 so if one of those two fail, so does filter 11. Who is on any of the other filters? (i.e. not 11, 12 or 13). If you are on a different set of filters, does your filter ever fail?

[Griff]

filter 11 - press f to pay respects

[Dom_]

Why is it always filter 11? I believe that filter's 12 and 13 are a subset of filter11 so if one of those two fail, so does filter 11. Who is on any of the other filters? (i.e. not 11, 12 or 13). If you are on a different set of filters, does your filter ever fail?

 

Fairly sure this config was changed - so 11/12/13 work independently now... I had schools in the subset stay up this afternoon (which must be on 12 & 13), I've also got schools on 5, 9 & 17 and they've been OK (in fact the one on 5 has only dropped once in 5 years)

[Bob_the_Goon]

Fairly sure this config was changed - so 11/12/13 work independently now... I had schools in the subset stay up this afternoon (which must be on 12 & 13), I've also got schools on 5, 9 & 17 and they've been OK (in fact the one on 5 has only dropped once in 5 years)

 

SB told me this afternoon that filter 12 had fallen over which meant filter11 was down. They said it was a child filter to filter 11.

 

I also thought that they had made a config change but it appears that they haven't, or at least, not the config change we thought they had.

[Shadow_Walker]

Filter 14 here. Been down a good number of times before.

[nathan]

We moved all ours to filter20 which has been pretty good. Well until the actual phone line was cut in our of our schools!

[synaesthesia]

Filter 9 for most schools here and it's terribly unreliable

[Samji3877]

So a lot of schools have no internet because SB is having crashes or outages?..... Seems like they have internet though seeing as they can reply and like other peoples comments. Hmmm...

[bossman]

@Edu-IT

 

Do you have any theories or Intel on why this keeps happening?

 

Would be good to have your input as your so keen to support SB?

 

Can't be just one piece of hardware that's caused the multiple issues Iv'e read on here today surely not?

 

We don't use them of course....they did want to come in and sell their wares to us but our school wasn't interested as we have had a faultless Internet supply for the past 5 years.....100% uptime although only 99.99% guaranteed in their SLA with valid KPI's.....just saying like

[synaesthesia]

So a lot of schools have no internet because SB is having crashes or outages?..... Seems like they have internet though seeing as they can reply and like other peoples comments. Hmmm...

 

Ever heard of mobile devices, 4g, SIM card, tablets....

And your only post on edugeek to boot. Great start, if you have something useful to add then please do.

Edited February 7, 2018 by ZeroHour
Going a bit far - ZH

[Dom_]

So a lot of schools have no internet because SB is having crashes or outages?..... Seems like they have internet though seeing as they can reply and like other peoples comments. Hmmm...

 

It's the filter that's dropping.. I wouldn't expect them to use a school filter in their offices...

[synaesthesia]

Not just the filter, routers too. Still, one of many, not all customers were affected nor themselves.

[Primus]

So a lot of schools have no internet because SB is having crashes or outages?..... Seems like they have internet though seeing as they can reply and like other peoples comments. Hmmm...

 

People have these amazing things called mobile phones...

[SchoolsBroadband]

Hello everyone,

 

sorry for my late replies today in full I've been in a board meeting.

 

The majority of our issues have been with Lightspeed servers crashing (we are still working with Lightspeed on resolving this) although we do very occasionally have a router blow up (2 in the last 18 months I think) or an NNI go down from the carrier (once in the last 24 months)

 

Some of you may scoff at this but we actually have 100% uptime on our Cisco core network providing connectivity to all direct internet access circuits (those using onsite firewall and filtering). We also have 100% uptime since the Fortigate bug (nearly 1 year ago now) on our hosted Fortigate platform. Furthermore, we've 100% uptime on our new Netsweeper filtering platform since it was launched. Some Lightspeed filters also have 100% uptime but not all as is well documented on here and our alert email updates to customers.

 

We have a viable high speed stable solution going forward which is our Netsweeper solution. Many customers have been contacted about this already. If you haven't and you'd like more information then please do send me a PM.

 

We have invested a huge amount in our new network and filtering platforms (many hundreds of thousands of pounds over the last 12 months) and we do not make huge profits as a business as we re-invest this into our network and staff.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

Edited February 7, 2018 by SchoolsBroadband

[Wubbalubbadub]

Hello everyone,

 

sorry for my late replies today in full I've been in a board meeting.

 

The majority of our issues have been with Lightspeed servers crashing (we are still working with Lightspeed on resolving this) although we do very occasionally have a router blow up (2 in the last 18 months I think) or an NNI go down from the carrier (once in the last 24 months)

 

Some of you may scoff at this but we actually have 100% uptime on our Cisco core network providing connectivity to all direct internet access circuits (those using onsite firewall and filtering). We also have 100% uptime since the Fortigate bug (nearly 1 year ago now) on our hosted Fortigate platform. Furthermore, we've 100% uptime on our new Netsweeper filtering platform since it was launched. Some Lightspeed filters also have 100% uptime but not all as is well documented on here and our alert email updates to customers.

 

We have a viable high speed stable solution going forward which is our Netsweeper solution. Many customers have been contacted about this already. If you haven't and you'd like more information then please do send me a PM.

 

We have invested a huge amount in our new network and filtering platforms (many hundreds of thousands of pounds over the last 12 months) and we do not make huge profits as a business as we re-invest this into our network and staff.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

 

Sorry Dave, but then 100%’s I feel are “suited to you”

In terms of a schools access to the internet.. that certainly isn’t 100%!

[Edu-IT]

@Edu-IT

 

Do you have any theories or Intel on why this keeps happening?

 

Would be good to have your input as your so keen to support SB?

 

Can't be just one piece of hardware that's caused the multiple issues Iv'e read on here today surely not?

 

We don't use them of course....they did want to come in and sell their wares to us but our school wasn't interested as we have had a faultless Internet supply for the past 5 years.....100% uptime although only 99.99% guaranteed in their SLA with valid KPI's.....just saying like

No and unlike others I don’t claim to have the theories or intel do I?

 

I’m not keen to support anyone. It was just as much an inconvenience to me as it was to everyone else and I have had discussions in relation to it.

 

What I have said is, however, that making broad statements without any real substance behind them doesn’t particularly help anyone. This was particularly in relation to comments along the lines of “they have no redundancy in place”. Nobody on here has yet posted in detail their configuration to suggest this is true, so why was I wrong to question it? That isn’t me defending SB or being their supporter, it is me wanting to know if there is truth in it as it will be a factor in future decision making processes if truthful.

 

I would ask the same question if it was any other service or provider I was using, if the same issues applied. The fact it is SB as a company is entirely irrelevant really. I get no benefits for supporting them, I get no disadvantages for criticising them. We pay the same as everyone else so it makes no odds to me.

 

I hope this justifies my position to you.

[forkies]

Just to throw a rock on the ice. Are the people who are of happy with SB move away when contract renews? I have been with an ISP away from LEA for 6 years with on premises filtering and had about 20 minutes of school hours downtime in the past two years. Which was due to our need to restart our filtering appliance during the day a few times.

 

Seems a lot of people complaining on the forums about downtime with various providers of off site filtering aimed at education. Are people who have been affected/complaining looking to move back to on premise solutions and business ISPs? Or are you hoping it will be *better* after you renew?

[synaesthesia]

We are moving to a supplier with local UTM solution for this reason. Confidence more than anything, and knowing if that goes belly up we could be up and running in mere monutes.

[ChrisC]

Just to throw a rock on the ice. Are the people who are of happy with SB move away when contract renews? I have been with an ISP away from LEA for 6 years with on premises filtering and had about 20 minutes of school hours downtime in the past two years. Which was due to our need to restart our filtering appliance during the day a few times.

 

Seems a lot of people complaining on the forums about downtime with various providers of off site filtering aimed at education. Are people who have been affected/complaining looking to move back to on premise solutions and business ISPs? Or are you hoping it will be *better* after you renew?

We have a direct access leased line and their hosted firewall from schools broadband and our own smoothwall box here and apart from yesterday's outage, about 10 minutes of DNS weirdness the other week and a short outage when they were hit by a ddos attack a couple years back (from memory) we haven't had much of any noticeable downtime caused by issues with them except when our traffic has occasionally maxed out our connection.

 

It does seem that we've been lucky compared to some other schools and it seems that's mostly down to the well documented issues with the hosted lightspeed. You could argue they've learnt from this and is why they're offering an alternative filtering package, admittedly with varying degrees of success so far by the sounds of things.

 

Our previous supplier was SWGfL and we had outages like yesterday every few weeks due to various issues.

 

I'm not necessarily defending what happened yesterday and can't form an opinion until they communicate the reasons it happened and what's being done to mitigate it in the future, but I just wanted to make that point that with any supplier there are going to be customers on both sides who have good and bad experiences.

[Fazza]

Some of you may scoff at this but we actually have 100% uptime on our Cisco core network providing connectivity to all direct internet access circuits

 

Says it all really, your data centers connection to the internet is OK, it's just the links from Schools to your data center and how they are configured/connected that is the thing you need to sort out.