Optimum broadband connection for a school?

[speckytecky]

We recently had an outage issue with our FTTC connection's onward link into the school - Cat6a External PE cable; which unfortunately has to traverse over a flat roof, was damaged and therefore took a fair bit of tracing to discover when it went down. We don't currently have any failover for this whatsoever and wanted to plan for a contingency to fix that situation.

 

What would folk one here recommend as the way to go that's not going to cost silly money, please? [h=1][/h]

[AlanD]

First - understand that an "SLA" (Service Level Agreement) does not guarantee any kind of connection. Yes - it guarantees that someone will come out and look at the problem - swap the router, check the connections etc but if a digger has dragged through a cable in the road don't expect the connection to be fixed for the next 6 weeks (possibly longer). Often Leased Lines are taken on the mistaken understanding that there is a guarantee of such a service via an SLA - and its simply not true.

 

I've always been an advocate of two connections - we have an FTTC and a Virgin Cable connection - originally into a load balancing router (Draytek) - then TMG and more recently smoothwall. Generally no one notices if a connection goes down (which isn't very often - but it DOES happen) except for the odd comment that the network seems a little slow today.

 

If you are not covered by two different technologies - then try to get 2 x FTTC connections into different corners of the school from different roadside cabinets. The cost FTTC lines are peanuts in the grand scheme of things.

 

There are companies that provide "bonded" services to multiple connections which you might prefer to loadbalancing which may have some advantages - its worth looking into.

 

In your case - it sounds as if the problem was essentially internal - your CAT6 cable presumably between router and school network - so it was presumably easy to identify (plug laptop into router - is there a connection....is there a connection the other end...no....must be the cable....

 

Or were you using a CAT6 to carry VDSL between BT socket and the router. Either way - hardly a difficult fault finding exercise. I think I would keeping the router next to the BT socket to ensure best data rates rather than carry VDSL any distance. And you could then arrange for a LAG (trunk) with two cables to carry the network to where its required so that if a cable failed it wouldn't matter. I try to have LAGs between all our switches (especially fibre ones with modules that are prone to failing).

 

Ultimately, of course it doesn't matter what you do. Things will always go wrong and fail. In which circumstances there is no substitute for a good network manager that should have it sorted in no time.

[karldenton]

Agree with the above. We have 2 different technologies. FTTC and virgin cable 300mb business.

Use virgin for internet traffic endnote fttc for inter site connectivity. If virgin goes down our Sophos UTM auto fails over and no one knows.

[Wave9_Lee]

Dual FttC is a good solution, and probably sensible to get them from different ISP - although you won't be able to protect against the digger scenario, or key exchange/cabinet failure. Depending on your location 4G is becoming a viable backup technology. It's independent of your primary connection, so no digger. exchange or ISP issues and data rates are pretty cost effective these days.