Looking for wan Recommendations

[Chockster]

It's that time again. Our Virgin Connection is up for renewal, and despite the fact it's only been down twice in three years, and never for more than a couple of hours, financial pressures are causing us to look elsewhere for better value. As part of our staff development our NM has asked me to have a look around for some alternatives, but I'm not sure what's around at the moment.

 

We've got gigabit up and down, 14 external IPs and do all firewall filtering on our own smoothwall. A simple bare connection is all we really need, but we've taken over a couple of primary schools this year, so if we could do something fancy with them (they're currently on standard BT business fibre, which is pretty terrible) that'd be nice, as our current VPN setup works, but feels a bit fragile.

 

Has anyone got any suggestions of other companies we can look at please?

 

Thanks in advance...

[denzal2k4]

You could potentially do what we have done and get a SHDS (short haul data service) to connect the sites together, its a dedicated no frills link between the buildings, you then use your site as the main internet connection and all traffic and filtering goers through you, we pay £5.5k a year I believe for a 1Gb dedicated link and its been up and running 2 years now with no issues, saving a packet on infrastructure at our primary school as they have no servers, no internet connection/ filtering, telephony costs, they utilise all of our infrastructure, our case study here. Let me know if you want more info re costs/ technical.

[Chockster]

Thanks for that - the primary school stuff looks really interesting. I'll have a read through the case study and maybe come back with a few questions...

[JackCPickup]

For the site-to-site aspect I would use ZeroTier.

[FN-GM]

You could potentially do what we have done and get a SHDS (short haul data service) to connect the sites together, its a dedicated no frills link between the buildings, you then use your site as the main internet connection and all traffic and filtering goers through you, we pay £5.5k a year I believe for a 1Gb dedicated link and its been up and running 2 years now with no issues, saving a packet on infrastructure at our primary school as they have no servers, no internet connection/ filtering, telephony costs, they utilise all of our infrastructure, our case study here. Let me know if you want more info re costs/ technical.

 

This is what we do with our primary schools but we don't pay quite as much. Had it 3 years and works great. Never been any downtime.

[SchoolsBroadband]

We do all of the above and even some 10Gbit Ethernet, Waves and Dark fibre as part of a WAN

 

PM sent.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[denzal2k4]

Interested to know how much you pay and the distance of the link? I think ours is about 2km and install was £2200, with £5.5k annual for 1Gb.

 

Thanks

This is what we do with our primary schools but we don't pay quite as much. Had it 3 years and works great. Never been any downtime.

[FN-GM]

Interested to know how much you pay and the distance of the link? I think ours is about 2km and install was £2200, with £5.5k annual for 1Gb.

 

Thanks

 

The sites are 1.1 miles apart. The install was £2k and for 1GB it was just under £4k a year.

[nathan]

For the site-to-site aspect I would use ZeroTier.

 

@JackCPickup

 

this looks interesting, have you any experience using it or are you just pointing it out?

[JackCPickup]

@JackCPickup

 

this looks interesting, have you any experience using it or are you just pointing it out?

 

I use it for lab (home/cloud hybrid) and testing at work. We have site-to-site VPNs with all our customers running on Cisco ASAs atm which I'd like to change.