JANET

[stuartp44]

Hi All,

 

I am currently going through the motion of looking for a new supplier for our internet connection, which is due for renewal in September. Due to the time it takes for install and the time it takes to transition, we are looking at doing it soon. The question, which is regarding suppliers, is JANET. If you are an academy, you can now purchase a internet pipe directly from JANET. The costing I have got so far is one of extremly good value, which would mean we can more for less, which is always a future bonus because it is a 1gig connection. So my question is, does anyone goto JANET direct? aka not connected via a county council. If so, how do you find the service and is it a good internet service? Just after some feedback really, because I dont want to commit to something that is a poor system, which I am sure it isnt.

 

Stuart

[FN-GM]

I asked for a price from JANET a while ago and it was through the roof! Is this academy pricing you are talking about new?

 

Thanks

[Norphy]

I can’t speak for their school offerings but the Sixth Form College I used to work for uses them. They were very happy with their provision when I was working there and, as far as I know, they still are.

 

In eight years of working there, I think we had maybe two outages which weren’t related to our equipment.

[knightrider]

I also can't speak for schools, but I have been using JANET for the last 5 years in FE and I have 5 connections with them. Great service, professional and no major issues in all that time. I also agree with them being great value for money

[Roberto]

Hi All,

 

I am currently going through the motion of looking for a new supplier for our internet connection, which is due for renewal in September. Due to the time it takes for install and the time it takes to transition, we are looking at doing it soon. The question, which is regarding suppliers, is JANET. If you are an academy, you can now purchase a internet pipe directly from JANET. The costing I have got so far is one of extremly good value, which would mean we can more for less, which is always a future bonus because it is a 1gig connection. So my question is, does anyone goto JANET direct? aka not connected via a county council. If so, how do you find the service and is it a good internet service? Just after some feedback really, because I dont want to commit to something that is a poor system, which I am sure it isnt.

 

Stuart

 

I use a JANET connection (I'm the Infrastructure manager at the 6th form College @Norphy used to work for). The connection is great value, is very reliable to the point where outages are a "once every few years" event at the absolute most.

 

Support is first class, responsiveness of the people providing the support is quick and their knowledge of the system is great. Their monitoring of the connection is fantastic and they will give you good visibility into the connection stats for your connection and all the other links from the JANET network out to the Internet at large (they have several) and they have direct link pipes into major providers such as Amazon/AWS, Microsoft/Azure and so-on so connections to these services are both highly reliable, fast, low latency, etc.

 

I would always use JANET for the internet connection anywhere it was a possibility. If you're able to be part of JISC as well as a JANET user, there's also some very good value to be had out of things like Eduroam, their certificate purchasing services, legal services, ATHENS, and so-on.

Edited January 10, 2018 by Roberto

[localzuk]

They don't list academies as being eligible to connect on their site:

 

• Government funded further and higher education organisations
  
• Research Council led organisations
  
• An organisation whose main activity is in higher or further education or who is involved in collaboration with the research or education community (in the UK or elsewhere).

[Roberto]

They don't list academies as being eligible to connect on their site:

 

 

 

I've had confirmation that academies are eligible to join or remain members of JANET/JISC. The site hasn't been updated yet.

[colacao82]

I just had a quote from JANET and it was astronomical! Almost as much as we pay county but without the AV and Filtering! Does anyone else have any suggestion?

[FN-GM]

I just had a quote from JANET and it was astronomical! Almost as much as we pay county but without the AV and Filtering! Does anyone else have any suggestion?

 

Got to a normal ISP, you will get much better value.

 

I would avoid schools broadband though...

[localzuk]

I recommend Exa Networks.

[Wave9_Lee]

/puts head above parapet

[epoch_roots]

I recommend Exa Networks.

 

I don't - we have internet/surfprotect provided by Exa and it has been down at least twice in two weeks. One time they didn't bother to update their status page so I had to ring support. It rang for so long without being answered that I ended up hanging up.

Edited February 6, 2018 by epoch_roots

[Meldrew]

We get a good deal from BT with a business FTTP connection.

 

Meldrew

[EXA_Mark]

Hi Epoch_roots,

 

Can you pm me with your details so I can get in touch as I would like to look into this for you.

 

Exa's various connectivity options (DSL, FTTC, EoFTTC, Leased Lines or DarkLight) did not have any outages at a network level in the past two weeks at all. Our network is fully redundant across multiple datacentres, across diverse geographic areas of the UK. That is not to say your individual connection did not have an issue, hence my request for a PM.

 

On the SurfProtect side, there were two outages (w/c 8th January), each one was approximately 15 minutes. This was whilst we were putting an update in place as part of SurfProtect continual development. Whilst we try to avoid any outages, sometimes things happen, and despite rigorous lab testing on all updates, sometimes things just work differently when you have a million plus concurrent connected users all doing very different things. We then had a freeze change during Bett week, as we know, that not only do we have staff out (although predominatly from the sales side), but our schools have key staff there too, which is why we do not do any optional updates or upgrades to our networks, servers or software (such as SurfProtect) during that time.

 

The aforementioned SurfProtect update was then done in an evening maintenance window earlier this week without issue.

 

On the status page, again without more details, I cannot comment specifically, but we do update these straight away as soon as an incident is known. You can find information at https://status.exa.net.uk/ where you can also subscribe for automatic updates, or connect to feeds such as RSS or Atom if you have not done already.

 

On the phone that is weird. As in the first instance it rings our reception, then if they are busy and unable to answer within three rings, every phone in the office rings, which is why we have such quick answering time. That does not mean it is impossible that there wasn't an issue, but if it rang through at our end it would never ring for even 30 seconds without being answered by someone in our office.

 

Back to the start though, please pm me with your details and let me look into it.

Edited February 7, 2018 by EXA_Mark

[DanTechnician]

Hi,

 

We have used JANET since our collage opened and the customer service, particularly for extras (e.g. eduroam), we have found be very good. JANET is also very fast and reliable. I would recommend them.

[round2it]

No outages at exa network since we joined a year ago. Support is fantastic especially for learning nm like myself they go above and beyond.

[Mr.Ben]

Quite simply, you pay for what you get when looking at network connectivity - Look closely at the offerings and what you plan to do.

 

For example if you are a heavy Azure user, you want your ISP to have a direct connection to Azure, not backhaul it out over the Internet.

 

Of course all of these types of things add a bit more to the cost of a connection, hence I suspect the higher cost of the Janet links (as it's pretty much the gold standard)

[mark1980]

Does eduroam usually come as a standard extra? For those that are on Janet - what sort of speeds are you getting?

[knightrider]

yes, simple to setup. Getting about 93mb on a 100mb connection download and 6mb on upload

[psydii]

Worth taking a look at LGfL/TrustNet. They are Janet connected and have similar reliability. We’ve only had a few hours of downtime in the last 6 years. Recovered faster than Janet during a major DNS DDOS too.

 

Their chief exec posts here sometimes .