Schools Broadband - Anyone else having Internet issues today?

[JGoswell]

Not sure if it was a coincidence but we had issues on an RM connection at the same time as having SB issues in 3 of our schools.

 

I have enough to do let alone having heads/teachers/ceo's etc moaning at me because the internet is down once again.

 

I'm beginning to wonder if we can use just the line and get our own filtering as it always seems to be a lightspeed issue.

 

Hi Nathan,

 

Did you contact our Service Desk for your RM school? If not, please send me your details and I will get an engineer to call you directly. We have not seen any network issues.

We did see a very busy day on our network after patch Tuesday, with some customers maxing out their individual connection’s bandwidth at times. However we still had over 50% of spare network and filtering capacity allowing customers to fully utilise their connections to download updates. Throughout the day RM served over 10TB of Windows Updates.

 

Jamie Goswell

[sister_annex]

When we initially signed up @SchoolsBroadband were looking at whether their own wsus server may be useful (we have our own in school and only manually update a few clients) - Do you know whether anything like this is planned in the future Dave? I understand that it may be a config change, especially for primaries, but most that have technical support could do this with a simple script/GPO update. Just a thought...

[SchoolsBroadband]

it's something we have looked at but isn't on the priority list at the moment if I'm honest.

 

I'd highly recommend all schools have their own WSUS server onsite as it'll really help with your bandwidth usage on patch tuesday, particularly if you're a large secondary school. We see some schools max out their own full 1Gbit leased lines for a bit when the patches all get downloaded directly to each PC and it's a big update.

 

Dave

[Primus]

I cannot understand why a school wouldn't run a WSUS server or WUS using SCCM tbh.

 

That said if you're selling an uncontended product and then make excuses that the usage of other schools is impacting that's not great either!

[Blue_Cookeh]

It's less of a problem with Windows 10 if you have P2P LAN updates configured, though.

[Fazza]

I cannot understand why a school wouldn't run a WSUS server or WUS using SCCM tbh.

 

That said if you're selling an uncontended product and then make excuses that the usage of other schools is impacting that's not great either!

 

Personally I cant understand why other Schools performing Windows Updates affects our Internet Connection when we aren't downloading any Windows Updates?

[snagrat]

Personally I cant understand why other Schools performing Windows Updates affects our Internet Connection when we aren't downloading any Windows Updates?

 

Seriously?

 

End of day you all share the same connection from the Schools Broadband (or any other ISP) to the Internet. If others are downloading GBs of data, regardless if it is Windows Updates or any other data, then the connection will get saturated and affect everyone sharing that pipe

[Fazza]

Seriously?

 

End of day you all share the same connection from the Schools Broadband (or any other ISP) to the Internet. If others are downloading GBs of data, regardless if it is Windows Updates or any other data, then the connection will get saturated and affect everyone sharing that pipe

 

Then that means our Internet is contended!!

 

You cant have a 1:1 contention ratio that is affected by other users as the whole idea of have a 1:1 contention is that other users aren't supposed to have an effect on your line.

 

If you pay for a 100Mbps 1:1 contention ratio internet connection, what speed do you think you should be getting? a) 100Mbps b)1.5Mbps or c) a random amount depending on other peoples usage (i.e. a contended connection even though you've paid for a 1:1 contention internet connection)?

[nathan]

Then that means our Internet is contended!!

 

You cant have a 1:1 contention ratio that is affected by other users as the whole idea of have a 1:1 contention is that other users aren't supposed to have an effect on your line.

 

If you pay for a 100Mbps 1:1 contention ratio internet connection, what speed do you think you should be getting? a) 100Mbps b)1.5Mbps or c) a random amount depending on other peoples usage (i.e. a contended connection even though you've paid for a 1:1 contention internet connection)?

Does any ISP in the world have a 1:1 contention ratio for the backhaul?

[snagrat]

Then that means our Internet is contended!!

 

You cant have a 1:1 contention ratio that is affected by other users as the whole idea of have a 1:1 contention is that other users aren't supposed to have an effect on your line.

 

If you pay for a 100Mbps 1:1 contention ratio internet connection, what speed do you think you should be getting? a) 100Mbps b)1.5Mbps or c) a random amount depending on other peoples usage (i.e. a contended connection even though you've paid for a 1:1 contention internet connection)?

 

Contended to the internet, not back to SB data centre

 

Somewhere on an uncontended connection you will share it with some else

[Blue_Cookeh]

Yes, when it's 'uncontended' you're just pushing the contention further up the chain, at the end of the day people like SB, BT, Zen aren't going to give you uncontended interconnects with other providers Edited June 26, 2017 by Blue_Cookeh

[Fazza]

Contended to the internet, not back to SB data centre

 

Somewhere on an uncontended connection you will share it with some else

 

So it's like an ISP advertising 'upto 80Mbps' broadband when in reality a user perhaps only gets 19Mbps all the time.

[nathan]

So it's like an ISP advertising 'upto 80Mbps' broadband when in reality a user perhaps only gets 19Mbps all the time.

No, as that's the connection back to the data centre or to the interconnect

Edited June 26, 2017 by nathan

[Fazza]

No, as that's the connection back to the data centre or to the backhaul.

 

I still think it's a little misleading selling a 100Mbps line that will go down to as little as 1.5Mbps because other users are doing Windows Updates. For me this is Upto 100Mbps connection. It doesnt matter if you have a 100Mbps connectiong or 1Gbps connection, if there's only 1.5Mbps bandwidth available for you that's a contended broadband with an upto speed.

[nathan]

Well it shouldn't normally, I would guess they have to manage how much bandwidth they will need. On occasion they'll get it wrong when there's high demand.

[Fazza]

On occasion they'll get it wrong when there's high demand.

 

We've been having issues for several years!

[FN-GM]

One of our schools left 18 months into a 3 year contract due to such a poor service.

[nathan]

We've been having issues for several years!

We have 13 schools on their connection, 3 with 100meg leased lines. We've had a few issues with slow speeds on one of the leased lines which was a talk talk business issue. On the whole speed wise it's been good.

[nathan]

Just a heads up, Schools Broadband have recently made live a 10gb link into the Akamai network, their CDN is responsible for delivering (amongst others) Microsoft and Apple traffic. Hopefully this will resolve the issues from the last patch Tuesday. Edited July 6, 2017 by nathan

[sted]

im not sure you necessarily want to be posting those dns server in public

[nathan]

Removed.

 

They've been emailed out to customers.

[fiza]

Here we go again!! Problems with filter 9. Internet and phones down at our Primary School. Anyone else having issues?

[sted]

Here we go again!! Problems with filter 9. Internet and phones down at our Primary School. Anyone else having issues?

 

yup luckily no kids in but its running at ~1mb today here

[ful56_uk]

Yeah down here too

[Nightshade2k]

Schools Broadband have had issues since Tuesday 14th now were at friday 17th and the issues continue! and my school is effectively crippled, the issue being our backup line also goes through their core systems so if there core is crippled were doomed, since we are reliant on Office 365 4 days with unusable internet is like cutting ones arm off. Have been told several different things across the days.

 

1) its you not our end

2) its a DDOS

3) its the lightspeed filters not load balancing

4) its super patch day and everyone i cramming MS updates

5) its one of our Core Edge devices

 

have spent pretty much most of my week getting key docs off of peoples onedrives its that bad using my tech teams combined might of 4G connections.

 

As soon as we can leave i think its going to have to be back to the LEA.