Virgin Media

[garethEds]

Good afternoon,

 

As I put together this feasibility study for going it alone as a school for IT provision, my next step is to look at our broadband connections. In our area we have BT and we have Virgin. There are no local schools to ask, so I come here to ask - is anyone using products from these two companies? What sort of products do you have?

 

I'm not spoken to BT yet. Virgin have come back with two options. Business Broadband at 300mbit down/15mbit up - seems slow going up. They also have their managed lines but are expensive (but monitored).

 

We are a school with ~950 pupils using Office 365 so heavy broadband use. Pupils will soon have to save their files to OneDrive. We also need a second line for our wifi.

 

Any advice or stories would be welcome. I will say again that this is for a feasibility study so no sales calls please.

Gareth

[Andycat]

We used to have Virgin, but are now on 1gb BT. Great service generally, only had one downtime and that was when everyone else did (fire somewhere I think?).

 

Price is good too, but we bought as a few schools together. Separate lines but a joint bid.

 

1600 pupils, 200 staff. All O365, all ipads.

[Wubbalubbadub]

With that pupil count, i would say a leased line is a must.. Are you looking for web filtering too? Some companies offer cloud services for that. IE.. schools broadband. But I would avoid them at the moment!

[garethEds]

We used to have Virgin, but are now on 1gb BT. Great service generally, only had one downtime and that was when everyone else did (fire somewhere I think?).

 

Price is good too, but we bought as a few schools together. Separate lines but a joint bid.

 

1600 pupils, 200 staff. All O365, all ipads.

 

Hi @Andycat - do you have a contact name for BT? If you could Dm me? Oh and what the service is called?

 

Thanks

 

Gareth

[garethEds]

With that pupil count, i would say a leased line is a must.. Are you looking for web filtering too? Some companies offer cloud services for that. IE.. schools broadband. But I would avoid them at the moment!

 

Thank you. Yes - we will look at filtering but will evaluate our own products instead of relying on the line provider.

 

Gareth

[Passat1983ICTech]

have a look at M247 we have them her and we have 100mb line we have 1000 users

[JackCPickup]

We sell on Evolving Networks solution. They used bonded connections from different providers. Greater throughput and redundancy.

[mikkydoos]

Why do you need another line for your wifi?

 

 

I'd say you're looking at a leased line. Virgin infrastructure is good for us but we can't get BT on-site here. Dealing with Virgin direct is expensive and their support is awful. Better off going with a reseller.

With leased lines you have an SLA guaranteeing uptime, usually 99%. Refund penalties are incurred by the ISP if they fail to meet the % within a particular month.

 

Some are going to say FTTC will suffice instead of a FTTP but I personally wouldn't especially with your numbers.

 

You'll need a firewall and filtering solution such as Smoothwall, Sophos UTM, Bloxx etc etc but thats pretty much it.

 

It will look expensive at the beginning. We compared our independent contract renewals to our local LA's offering when we renewed this Easter and it was less than half.

 

We've been independent for 4 years now and haven't looked back. Everything is so much more reliable too when compared to our old LA provision.

 

 

Hope this helps

 

 

EDIT: Once you start talking to suppliers you'll get a much better picture of what goes on. Many of them sell filtering and firewall solutions too whether cloud hosted or in house. There is quite a long order to live date too. Usually a minimum of three months.

Edited May 23, 2017 by mikkydoos

[mavhc]

Anything faster than the speeds you can see prices for will be location dependent, so you'll have to talk to them to get actual prices

[garethEds]

have a look at M247 we have them her and we have 100mb line we have 1000 users

 

Thanks mate - but a search of their postcode checker tells me they are not available in our area.

 

Gareth

[Passat1983ICTech]

are you using smoothwall ?

[garethEds]

are you using smoothwall ?

 

We use a centralised Smoothwall solution with all servers at the LEA.

 

Gareth

[Snuffkins]

We've used Virgin Media for a few years now since moving from our LA. 200mb primary line with 100mb backup. We've had no problems with them at all. Very happy with the service we've received.

[mavhc]

We've used Virgin Media for a few years now since moving from our LA. 200mb primary line with 100mb backup. We've had no problems with them at all. Very happy with the service we've received.

 

200 symmetric? How much are you paying?

[hallb15]

Have you tried Exa Networks? We've been with them for 3 years without any major issues (although typically as I type this there is an issue with the core network but its a rare occurrence)

They've never bothered us with sales pitches, just sensible advice. We're in the process of upgrading form 40Mb FTTC to 100Mb fibre. Give Matt an email [email protected] to see what they can offer you.

[newpersn]

Have you tried Exa Networks? We've been with them for 3 years without any major issues (although typically as I type this there is an issue with the core network but its a rare occurrence)

They've never bothered us with sales pitches, just sensible advice. We're in the process of upgrading form 40Mb FTTC to 100Mb fibre. Give Matt an email [email protected] to see what they can offer you.

 

+1

 

Not had any problems bar emails coming though. (Just a junk email filter setting too high)

 

Would recommend any anyone

[SchoolsBroadband]

We hundreds of wholesale leased line connections with both Virgin Media and LLU Providers using BT Openreach fibre (BT Wholesale, Talk Talk, Vodafone etc).

 

Once both services are in they are pretty damn reliable as you get what you pay for with leased lines. However we find everything around delivering Virgin Media much more difficult and cumbersome. Their billing is also an absolute nightmare and consistently wrong. We spend a fortune just getting them to fix their bills!

 

With us managing the relationship with Virgin Media our customers never see those billing issues, but its something to bear in mind when choosing a supplier.

 

If you'd like a quote from us we'd be happy to send one over.

 

Good luck

 

Dave

[Snuffkins]

200 symmetric? How much are you paying?

 

Around 14k for that and the backup line.

[SchoolsBroadband]

Using Virgin direct? The prices are a lot lower than that now!

 

Dave

[mthomas08]

We use a company called Orbital. They are very local to us and only about 20 minute drive.

 

They were able to provide the same Lightspeed filtering system, Spam mail filters and a 200MB connection instead of 100MB. On top of that the main reason why we looked elsewhere was cost. We managed to save around 20%.

 

We've also got more control over those systems with no real extra work load. They really know their stuff and have been fantastic support wise. The sweet cherry on top is we've got a backup wireless connection in the event some one cuts our main line.

 

Interestingly enough when mentioned to our previous provider that we found a company willing to do "like for like" service their reaction was to not only cut their price but also offer us 300MB connection. When we asked a short time before this conversation they offered 200MB at around 25% cost increase. So you could probably guess we was not 100% happy over this and we did tell them. We can also provide Lightspeed reports much quicker because previously at times it could take minutes > hours and even days to get a single report off.

 

This company also provided our telephones + provider. All good costs and not expensive. They seem very willing to do what it takes to get Schools on board which includes - cost saving.

[AlanD]

With that pupil count, i would say a leased line is a must.. Are you looking for web filtering too? Some companies offer cloud services for that. IE.. schools broadband. But I would avoid them at the moment!

 

There is nothing anywhere that equates pupil count with what you need. What you need is a good look at your usage graphs/data. For example our outgoing data averages out at around 5Mb/s throughout most of the day. There are a few peaks of twice this - usually when the office decides to send out an email to all parents containing graphics rather than a link to letter uploaded to the website which they are supposed to do. Download averages out at around 50Mb/s. And yes - we use Office 365 and google docs ..and various online stuff such as kerboodle and MyMaths. - but we are a smaller school at around 800 students from the age of 3 to 18. - Oh - and we have both staff and students with BYOD. To serve this we have an FTTC line 80/20 Mb/s which also provides some fixed IPs for security cameras, Heating Boilers, credit card machines and VoIP. And just in case that goes down we have a Virgin 200/15 Mb/s cable broadband. Both used to feed into a dual WAN router - Draytek - but now feed into smothwall for load balancing and fail over. Yes - becuase its broadband its contended - so yes there is some impact on download speeds - but I've never seen it have more than a 5% decrease - except in the evenings when I have seen a 20% knock. Thats still plenty of bandwidth though. Generally ISPs have lots of bandwidth during working hours - their problem is providing HD streaming in evenings so they have to over specify - which means lots of nice bandwidth during the day. So that costs us around £1200 per annum all up. Schools used to require leased lines because ADSL (at up to 8 or 16 Mb/s as never good enough as upload speeds were usually around 256K unless you paid for an Annex M service) - and many have just continued with them because they now get 100Mbs/s for the same money. But in reality normal broadband is now just fine for most schools - and certainly a lot cheaper. I guess the exception might be is were schools are sharing domain resources and access to common servers.

 

My guess is that if you signed up for Virgin and ran it along side your leased line - and swapped it over the only thing you would notice is how much faster it was...and how much money you saved.

 

Our 200Mb/s gives us around 210Mb/s on speed test at any time during the day.

[Wave9_Lee]

Hi Gareth, as other others have said, with that amount of pupils and traffic profile, I would consider a leased line solution. Someone mentioned that a reseller might be a better option than direct with VM or BT and I would have to agree (although i would say that I guess) A reseller will take all the strain of project management during delivery and provide you with some onsite installation resource as well as support throughout the contract. There can be quite a lot of pain dealing with telcos, and you will find that a direct price is often higher than through a reseller. Resellers have access to the telco Wholesale team including engineers and project management, so should be able to give you a better service.

 

With reference to VMB, desktop surveys show fibre as unavailable at your location, so some civils will be required. You probably have a BT tail installed (or have previously) as it's showing as 'on-net'. The VMB offer may be based on using a BT tail as this is quite often the case. You can get FttC @ approx 60Mbps down/15Mbps or a symmetrical 15Mbps EoFttC service.

 

Given your increasing reliance on O365 and additional WIFI requirement, perhaps look at a load-balanced FttC and 100Mbps Leased Line?

 

I'm curious why you need a second link for your WiFi, but 2 lines still make good sense.

[Matt_Renato]

Once both services are in they are pretty damn reliable as you get what you pay for with leased lines. However we find everything around delivering Virgin Media much more difficult and cumbersome. Their billing is also an absolute nightmare and consistently wrong. We spend a fortune just getting them to fix their bills!

 

I'd just like to echo this about Virgin. We used them as the internet supplier at my previous company, I never had an issue with the connection itself and whenever I needed to deal with their engineers I found them helpful and knowledgable. The admin side however was utterly useless. It took them over 6 months (and thats not an exaggeration), to update our address and send us a correct bill and that was only after hours upon hours worth of calls to them.

[bede]

I'd just like to echo this about Virgin. We used them as the internet supplier at my previous company, I never had an issue with the connection itself and whenever I needed to deal with their engineers I found them helpful and knowledgable. The admin side however was utterly useless. It took them over 6 months (and thats not an exaggeration), to update our address and send us a correct bill and that was only after hours upon hours worth of calls to them.

 

We used Virgin Business broadband (direct) for 6 years.

When we asked for quotes to renew they were uncompetitive and hardly moved on price.

 

Their back-end admin is not good. Took weeks to get the right bill when we renewed part way through.

Finally extracting ourselves was a right PITA. Not sure we would risk them again (though ironically our new underlying connection is actually a different pair of fibres in the same cable provided by Virgin!)

 

HOWEVER - technical support was excellent - both firewall and DNS teams. First class. Helpful, patient and very competent. Connection was very reliable, though this may depend on location I guess.

Edited June 27, 2017 by bede