ISP Recommendations

[NetworkNinja]

Hi All,

 

Currently we are with virgin media business however our contract is up for renewal, I have been give a price from EXA Networks and the price looks really good however i am wondering if anyone has any reviews regarding this company. I have found some but they are from years ago.

[localzuk]

We've been with Exa since July/August last year. Been rock solid. Great support too - you speak to people who actually do the tech work, not just script readers.

[mikkydoos]

Went with Zen Internet recently in favour of (a direct contract with) Virgin.

 

Happy so far and price was good. Support good too.

 

Was your Virgin re-quote sky high like ours?

 

We were quoted 8.5K a year for a 3 year term for 50mbs utilising the existing cabling -e.g. no civils.

Edited May 23, 2017 by mikkydoos

[nicholab]

Has anyone got a comparison of EXA vs BT as an ISP? That my choose my current provide are going to increase cost if I stay so I have to move.

[Wave9_Andy]

Hi All,

 

Currently we are with virgin media business however our contract is up for renewal, I have been give a price from EXA Networks and the price looks really good however i am wondering if anyone has any reviews regarding this company. I have found some but they are from years ago.

 

 

Happy to put some pricing together for you JJames. Also put you in touch with some reference customers.

 

Let me know if we can help. (We'll be at the conference next week too if you are attending)

 

Andy

Edited May 27, 2017 by Wave9_Andy

[Jobos]

Both of my schools are with Wave 9 and have found them very good.

[sparkeh]

We are with @Wave9 too and can recommend them [emoji3]

[AlanD]

We were quoted 8.5K a year for a 3 year term for 50mbs utilising the existing cabling -e.g. no civils.

 

I still can't get my head around schools paying this kind of money. I pay £1200 a year.

 

Now I do understand that schools once had to get leased lines - when ADSL provided 8Mb/s or 16Mb/s at best - and the upload speed was 256K. Usually school then paid for 10Mb/s leased line. As speeds increased to 100Mb/s for the same money schools thought they were getting something really good - but FTTC gives you 80Mb/s (and 20Mb/s upload) and that is fine for most things - including VoIP, Office 365, Google docs etc. In fact we have a 200Mb/s Virgin cable broadband as well - both originally fed into a draytek load balancing router - but now I feed them into smoothwall. If either go down (and FTTC modem locked up on a new version of firmware one day)...no one notices except it seems just a little slower.

 

Ah what about contention I hear you ask. And the answer is that from 6:00am to 6pm its not noticeable on any speed test (Virgin continues to gives me speed tests of 2010MB/s) Only in evenings do we notice anything like a 10 to 20% reduction - which is still plenty. ISPs have massive available bandwidth during the days - its in the evening when people start using HD streaming it begins to tell.

 

And - I hear you ask - what about guarantee of service. A lot of ignorance surrounds this. It does not mean they are guaranteeing you an internet supply. It means they are guaranteeing you a response (usually 4 hours) if the internet stops. If this is a failed router in the exchange it will take 24 or 48 hours to replace it. If its roadworks that have broken your connection it can be a week or more to restore your internet. And - by the way - you can pay for a similar guarantee for FTTC - it costs around £8 a month.

 

When I hear school complaining of lack of funds and simply automatically renewing leased lines I loose sympathy with them.

 

First step is to carefully analyse your usage. Our average upload floats around between 5 and 10Mb/s - even when using external services such as Office 365. Download on average below 50Mb/s - but yes, there are peaks - depending on the time period you average over - usually when I download an ISO image or something. And we use/allow BYOD too for students and staff. My guess is that a single FTTC or Virgin broadband line would be fine - but at that price having two connections gives wizzy speeds and redundancy protection.

[Edu-IT]

I still can't get my head around schools paying this kind of money. I pay £1200 a year.

 

Now I do understand that schools once had to get leased lines - when ADSL provided 8Mb/s or 16Mb/s at best - and the upload speed was 256K. Usually school then paid for 10Mb/s leased line. As speeds increased to 100Mb/s for the same money schools thought they were getting something really good - but FTTC gives you 80Mb/s (and 20Mb/s upload) and that is fine for most things - including VoIP, Office 365, Google docs etc. In fact we have a 200Mb/s Virgin cable broadband as well - both originally fed into a draytek load balancing router - but now I feed them into smoothwall. If either go down (and FTTC modem locked up on a new version of firmware one day)...no one notices except it seems just a little slower.

 

Ah what about contention I hear you ask. And the answer is that from 6:00am to 6pm its not noticeable on any speed test (Virgin continues to gives me speed tests of 2010MB/s) Only in evenings do we notice anything like a 10 to 20% reduction - which is still plenty. ISPs have massive available bandwidth during the days - its in the evening when people start using HD streaming it begins to tell.

 

And - I hear you ask - what about guarantee of service. A lot of ignorance surrounds this. It does not mean they are guaranteeing you an internet supply. It means they are guaranteeing you a response (usually 4 hours) if the internet stops. If this is a failed router in the exchange it will take 24 or 48 hours to replace it. If its roadworks that have broken your connection it can be a week or more to restore your internet. And - by the way - you can pay for a similar guarantee for FTTC - it costs around £8 a month.

 

When I hear school complaining of lack of funds and simply automatically renewing leased lines I loose sympathy with them.

 

First step is to carefully analyse your usage. Our average upload floats around between 5 and 10Mb/s - even when using external services such as Office 365. Download on average below 50Mb/s - but yes, there are peaks - depending on the time period you average over - usually when I download an ISO image or something. And we use/allow BYOD too for students and staff. My guess is that a single FTTC or Virgin broadband line would be fine - but at that price having two connections gives wizzy speeds and redundancy protection.

Firewall? Filtering?

[AlanD]

I prefer to ISP from filtering - or at least I would have some reservations that I was still getting good value for money. I certainly wouldn't want to tie myself to an ISP because they happened to include filtering for a inflated price. Filtering - is - relatively cheap. Draytek routers will do it for £40 a year with DNS filtering.... Sophos include it with end point protection...but it you need "monitoring" because you need meet the requirements of the prevent strategy you need something more substantial. And again firewalls are often incorporated into routers and things like pfsense are free - and are perfectly capable of being programmed with rules for what you want to allow in and out. If a leased line is right choice for you - and it might be - because you are part of multi site MAT in a shared domain or have cloud backup or are out in the sticks away from cabinets and cable connections then its worth aggressively shopping around - because Openreach have been reducing the prices - so 100Mb connections should be under £5000 a year now.

[localzuk]

I highly doubt Draytek's filtering ticks all the boxes all schools need to tick for filtering let alone monitoring.

 

Also £5k for a leased line may be possible in some cities but if you're anywhere remotely off the beaten track you can double that easily.

[SchoolsBroadband]

You'd be surprised @localzuk

 

For the majority of the UK we offer 100Mbit 1:1 leased lines for £4,500pa including Lightspeed content filtering and Fortinet security with an install fee and have been for nearly 2 years.

 

I do agree ref Draytek filtering though. Not good enough for a school in my opinion.

 

Dave

[nicholab]

Is any one on Wave9 BT resold product and how have they found it?

[Blue_Cookeh]

You'd be surprised @localzuk

 

For the majority of the UK we offer 100Mbit 1:1 leased lines for £4,500pa including Lightspeed content filtering and Fortinet security with an install fee and have been for nearly 2 years.

 

I do agree ref Draytek filtering though. Not good enough for a school in my opinion.

 

Dave

 

This is it. We paid more than the £1.2k @AlanD mentioned but the service we get from SB also gives us another VPN entry point for remote work (essential since I'm part time), DfE approved filtering, hosted firewall, and a top notch service desk when we've needed it. Our head has called the SB service desk on occasion when I'm not available and they've been more than happy to go in and modify our Lightspeed filtering whilst still on the phone. When we were with our LA we were paying more for less features and a much slower and crappier service desk.

 

I suppose it depends what you value most. I'm sure I could do the filtering etc our selves slightly cheaper but there's the CYA factor which is nice to have, too.

 

It was also nice to have someone who knew what they were doing during setup, when it came to the switch over I was on the phone with one of their NOC engineers for maybe 20 minutes while we set the various routes up on each end with 0 problems.

 

A while back SB were getting a little annoying with the filtering downtime, but since they solved those problems earlier this year I think we've had 100% uptime, so I would definitely recommend them nowadays.

Edited May 30, 2017 by Blue_Cookeh

[localzuk]

You'd be surprised @localzuk

 

For the majority of the UK we offer 100Mbit 1:1 leased lines for £4,500pa including Lightspeed content filtering and Fortinet security with an install fee and have been for nearly 2 years.

 

I do agree ref Draytek filtering though. Not good enough for a school in my opinion.

 

Dave

We must just be in a minority spot then. Maybe one day though.

[Edu-IT]

I prefer to ISP from filtering - or at least I would have some reservations that I was still getting good value for money. I certainly wouldn't want to tie myself to an ISP because they happened to include filtering for a inflated price. Filtering - is - relatively cheap. Draytek routers will do it for £40 a year with DNS filtering.... Sophos include it with end point protection...but it you need "monitoring" because you need meet the requirements of the prevent strategy you need something more substantial. And again firewalls are often incorporated into routers and things like pfsense are free - and are perfectly capable of being programmed with rules for what you want to allow in and out. If a leased line is right choice for you - and it might be - because you are part of multi site MAT in a shared domain or have cloud backup or are out in the sticks away from cabinets and cable connections then its worth aggressively shopping around - because Openreach have been reducing the prices - so 100Mb connections should be under £5000 a year now.

Point I was getting at though is that it's not just £1200. If you have to license other software there's that to add on. Then not all schools will have the time or skillset to manage a firewall and react when there's a DDoS or whatever. All these little bits and pieces add to the £1200 so its not like for like when comparing against other offerings. Not all providers will be inflating to rip off prices.

Edited May 30, 2017 by Edu-IT

[sparkeh]

Is any one on Wave9 BT resold product and how have they found it?

Not been with them long but so far its been top notch. It was the easiest broadband experience I've been through, everything happened when it was supposed to, we were kept well informed of progress and everyone turned up on site when scheduled (even the BT guys which was astounding given previous incompetent form). Connection has been rock solid so far.

[AlanD]

You'd be surprised @localzuk

 

For the majority of the UK we offer 100Mbit 1:1 leased lines for £4,500pa including Lightspeed content filtering and Fortinet security with an install fee and have been for nearly 2 years.

 

OK - so if you must have a leased line (and I'd want to take a close look at useage before I agreed that a leased line was the right option for a school) then this price sounds about right. Under £5000 and includes at least some kind of filtering (You'd need to check it links to your AD and is capable of producing suitable reports for "prevent" officer in school. Note Prevent does not require you to block or filter unsuitable sites - although that almost certainly would be necessary for some categories - but ideally you would leave some open if its likely to alert you to activities that might need you to take action)

[SchoolsBroadband]

OK - so if you must have a leased line (and I'd want to take a close look at useage before I agreed that a leased line was the right option for a school) then this price sounds about right. Under £5000 and includes at least some kind of filtering (You'd need to check it links to your AD and is capable of producing suitable reports for "prevent" officer in school. Note Prevent does not require you to block or filter unsuitable sites - although that almost certainly would be necessary for some categories - but ideally you would leave some open if its likely to alert you to activities that might need you to take action)

 

 

Sure. This comes with Lightspeed content filtering which includes Windows AD, Google Auth, Radius and various other authentication services and full reporting. it's fully prevent compliant.

 

You also get Fortinet firewalling and UTM too. Quite a few of our customers on here already use it.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[nathan]

You'd be surprised @localzuk

 

For the majority of the UK we offer 100Mbit 1:1 leased lines for £4,500pa including Lightspeed content filtering and Fortinet security with an install fee and have been for nearly 2 years.

 

I do agree ref Draytek filtering though. Not good enough for a school in my opinion.

 

Dave

 

Is this a new price @SchoolsBroadband?

 

3 of our schools are paying £4600 a year for the 100mb leased line

[SchoolsBroadband]

Yes,

 

our prices track our carriers. So when we get a small price decrease then we pass this on. This is only for new connections though, we are locked into the same contract term you are with us to our carriers and they don't give us discount on existing contracts unfortunately but that's the industry norm.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[nathan]

OK, thanks for the quick reply.

[TIOAOA]

with an install fee

 

Dave

@SchoolsBroadband out of curiosity whats the install fee and length of contract

[SchoolsBroadband]

on that particular deal its a 5 year with install of £2,900. It also includes Lightspeed filtering, Fortinet firewall, all routers, DNS management, web hosting etc etc.

 

See https://www.schoolsbroadband.co.uk/assets/Schools-Broadband-Package-Options-Brochure-Update1.pdf and you get everything in the platinum package.

 

We can also do a 3 year deal with no install if required too.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[mikkydoos]

I still can't get my head around schools paying this kind of money. I pay £1200 a year.

 

Now I do understand that schools once had to get leased lines - when ADSL provided 8Mb/s or 16Mb/s at best - and the upload speed was 256K. Usually school then paid for 10Mb/s leased line. As speeds increased to 100Mb/s for the same money schools thought they were getting something really good - but FTTC gives you 80Mb/s (and 20Mb/s upload) and that is fine for most things - including VoIP, Office 365, Google docs etc. In fact we have a 200Mb/s Virgin cable broadband as well - both originally fed into a draytek load balancing router - but now I feed them into smoothwall. If either go down (and FTTC modem locked up on a new version of firmware one day)...no one notices except it seems just a little slower.

 

Ah what about contention I hear you ask. And the answer is that from 6:00am to 6pm its not noticeable on any speed test (Virgin continues to gives me speed tests of 2010MB/s) Only in evenings do we notice anything like a 10 to 20% reduction - which is still plenty. ISPs have massive available bandwidth during the days - its in the evening when people start using HD streaming it begins to tell.

 

And - I hear you ask - what about guarantee of service. A lot of ignorance surrounds this. It does not mean they are guaranteeing you an internet supply. It means they are guaranteeing you a response (usually 4 hours) if the internet stops. If this is a failed router in the exchange it will take 24 or 48 hours to replace it. If its roadworks that have broken your connection it can be a week or more to restore your internet. And - by the way - you can pay for a similar guarantee for FTTC - it costs around £8 a month.

 

When I hear school complaining of lack of funds and simply automatically renewing leased lines I loose sympathy with them.

 

First step is to carefully analyse your usage. Our average upload floats around between 5 and 10Mb/s - even when using external services such as Office 365. Download on average below 50Mb/s - but yes, there are peaks - depending on the time period you average over - usually when I download an ISO image or something. And we use/allow BYOD too for students and staff. My guess is that a single FTTC or Virgin broadband line would be fine - but at that price having two connections gives wizzy speeds and redundancy protection.

 

 

What about when they go home and work off their VPN / RDS in the evening. VPN is slow enough but with reduced bandwidth it would be unusable.

Edited June 5, 2017 by mikkydoos