xicor Posted October 20, 2018 Posted October 20, 2018 (edited) we are paying £8k inc vat a year for a 100mb connection on a 5 year contract - we use the connection and sophos AV, web filtering, why do i feel this is abit much ? and i cant event edit the firewall settings..... does anyone know how much Virgin Media actually charge for a 100MB leased line ? Edited October 20, 2018 by xicor 1
Katy Posted October 20, 2018 Posted October 20, 2018 (edited) Ours on a 3 year contract 2014-2017 was about £11k a year inc VAT. Don't know what they charge now, we switched to another supplier at £8k a year inc VAT (again 3 year contract). I was speaking to our supplier the other day about additional bandwidth and apparently the price for 100Mbps lines has dropped again (but of course you don't see the price drop mid contract). So it's pretty much right, especially if you've got AV and filtering thrown in. Edit: We don't have any access to the Cisco router on Virgin, or on Gamma now, but there's no firewall rules or anything set up on them - we have to provide our own firewall for this. Edited October 20, 2018 by Katy 1
gh5000 Posted October 20, 2018 Posted October 20, 2018 we are paying £8k inc vat a year for a 100mb connection on a 5 year contract - we use the connection and sophos AV, web filtering, why do i feel this is abit much ? and i cant event edit the firewall settings..... does anyone know how much Virgin Media actually charge for a 100MB leased line ?It is one of these things where it comes with a lot of other things bundled. If you use the majority of them then it is cost effective. Atomwide get in the way more often than not and reportedly get paid a lot of your £8k for the pleasure. Webscreen 2.0 is shocking in functionality compared to what's on the market. Webscreen 3 is apparently coming but don't know what it'll be like. Having done the cost comparison recently we got to the point where it was relatively cost effective. The recent additions of licenses have been welcome. Neverware was a good way for us to reuse old computers over the summer which we would never have spent the money on otherwise. There's talk of them providing Smoothwalls visigo at no or reduced cost. Sophos intercept X give me a bit of piece of mind. Signed up for a few other offerings recently - egress switch, sophos server advanced. Can't remember the others that are available. We also got our price reduced recently although required another 5 year contract. Have a few email addresses of people that can help if you need them. 2
Zoom7000 Posted October 20, 2018 Posted October 20, 2018 I would highly recommend LGfL/TrustNET to any school going forward. Under the leadership of the new CEO, @JohnJackson, who is active here and very active on Twitter and always willing to talk to customers directly, LGfL has really transformed themselves to helping schools get the best deals and not just with broadband. Some of the additional stuff that has become available to LGfL has been awesome: Free Sophos Intercept X (Anti-Ransomware) Free Sophos Server Advanced (Anti-Ransomware for servers) Free Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Free Meraki MDM licenses (LGfL's implementation is now the second biggest implementation of Malwarebytes in the world!) Free Egress Switch licenses Free Neverware licenses with discounted discounted chromebook licenses Free Cisco WebEx Meetings (Just call Atomwide to schedule a meeting) Free training and support for schools (Curriculum support, digital transformation support, Office 365 training, excellent G Suite training, free user provisioning for cloud services, safeguarding support, EYFS training and support) - All delivered from LGfL's new HQ very close to Liverpool Street. Those are just the ones I know about off the top of my head! With regards to Atomwide, if you have any issues, you might find speaking to LGfL or contacting John directly, will definitely bear some fruitful results in your favour! And I would also advise you to get in touch with LGfL if you have any concerns or queries over the price you might be paying. LGfL have been very competitive for me when getting quotes for several schools and with the value added above, is usually by far the best bang for your buck. LGfL really are saving schools huge amounts of money with a lot more to come from the many conversations I've had with them. 2
xicor Posted October 21, 2018 Author Posted October 21, 2018 the problems i have below lack of direct control over the firewall - this is causing major problems as it purely relies on a painfully inefficient process to get anything allowed through, had to send them hundreds of IP's the other day just to allow AWS-RDS through, also over the weekend i couldn't do anything not able to allow a specific youtube video that is blocked on restricted mode, to do that i have to change the whole category of youtube filtering! lack of remote support tools, again they make the process so painful and over-complicated web screen - might as well use windows NT as even that seems more user friendly automatically blocking Meraki! again I have to send a list of IP's and go through the process we pay 8k but we will likely end up paying more in total as now I'm forced to consider getting our own firewall as this isn't sustainable or manageable, none of the points above their support can do anything about, probably suggest reading more instructions or use a new product etc we are still on contract for another 4 years - unfortunately I would highly recommend LGfL/TrustNET to any school going forward. Under the leadership of the new CEO, @JohnJackson, who is active here and very active on Twitter and always willing to talk to customers directly, LGfL has really transformed themselves to helping schools get the best deals and not just with broadband. Some of the additional stuff that has become available to LGfL has been awesome: Free Sophos Intercept X (Anti-Ransomware) Free Sophos Server Advanced (Anti-Ransomware for servers) Free Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Free Meraki MDM licenses (LGfL's implementation is now the second biggest implementation of Malwarebytes in the world!) Free Egress Switch licenses Free Neverware licenses with discounted discounted chromebook licenses Free Cisco WebEx Meetings (Just call Atomwide to schedule a meeting) Free training and support for schools (Curriculum support, digital transformation support, Office 365 training, excellent G Suite training, free user provisioning for cloud services, safeguarding support, EYFS training and support) - All delivered from LGfL's new HQ very close to Liverpool Street. Those are just the ones I know about off the top of my head! With regards to Atomwide, if you have any issues, you might find speaking to LGfL or contacting John directly, will definitely bear some fruitful results in your favour! And I would also advise you to get in touch with LGfL if you have any concerns or queries over the price you might be paying. LGfL have been very competitive for me when getting quotes for several schools and with the value added above, is usually by far the best bang for your buck. LGfL really are saving schools huge amounts of money with a lot more to come from the many conversations I've had with them. 1
xicor Posted October 21, 2018 Author Posted October 21, 2018 was your primary reason for leaving financial ? or was there other issues you had ? Ours on a 3 year contract 2014-2017 was about £11k a year inc VAT. Don't know what they charge now, we switched to another supplier at £8k a year inc VAT (again 3 year contract). I was speaking to our supplier the other day about additional bandwidth and apparently the price for 100Mbps lines has dropped again (but of course you don't see the price drop mid contract). So it's pretty much right, especially if you've got AV and filtering thrown in. Edit: We don't have any access to the Cisco router on Virgin, or on Gamma now, but there's no firewall rules or anything set up on them - we have to provide our own firewall for this. 1
Katy Posted October 21, 2018 Posted October 21, 2018 was your primary reason for leaving financial ? or was there other issues you had ? I didn't even ask Virgin for a quote when we left them, the connection itself was fine but as we were direct with Virgin and not via another supplier, customer service was dreadful (e.g. I tried for 3 years to get online billing, every email or call about it just got ignored. Terminating it at the end of the 3 years took 2 letters recorded delivery (ignored), 10 phone calls (everything they said never happened, we still got them chasing us for the following year's bill), eventually managed to talk to someone with a clue a few months later when they contacted us wanting to do maintenance on the line, and I said "what line? It was terminated months ago" - surprise surprise, no it wasn't but they eventually sorted it out.
mavhc Posted October 21, 2018 Posted October 21, 2018 When I got quotes earlier this year for 100/100: VM 6900, Southern Communications 4000 (8000 for Gb), Exa 4250, Wave 9 3800, hSo 3750-4000, Schools Broadband 4750. Went with Exa as AD based filtering was only £100 more, compared to buying a web filtering licence for a firewall
JohnJackson Posted October 21, 2018 Posted October 21, 2018 Hi everyone. I'm the CEO of LGfL and this is a good thread raising some key points. LGfL provides a subscription not a connection and you connect to a safe infrastructure not just the internet. I am absolutely at the moment fixed on delivering improved value for schools and I've been adding products in response to feedback. Recently we've added Meraki Device Management, Sophos Intercept X, Egress Switch, Malwarebytes, Sophos Phish, Sophos Server Advance to the subscription. We also already bundle a range of curriculum products including Busythings & J2e. I've also just added Neverware. In total, a secondary school will save around 15k consuming the bundle and a primary around 7k. But its about to get a lot lot better. I have every intention in the next few months creating the worlds fastest schools network and it won't cost schools any more! I'm boosting connectivity to support cloud services, 4k streaming and an announcement is imminent. Further, I will be adding further to the bundle for monitoring and for security. 2
JohnJackson Posted October 21, 2018 Posted October 21, 2018 Please rest assured LGfL is committed to some further improvements and thanks for recognising the value of the additional options we've added. 1
Katy Posted October 21, 2018 Posted October 21, 2018 Just to clear up any potential confusion, my rant about customer service above relates to Virgin - as an Independent school in the North West of England we've never had anything to do with LGfL.
JohnJackson Posted October 21, 2018 Posted October 21, 2018 Katy, I'm really sorry you had this experience with Virgin Media. I think this thread demonstrates the importance for all of us helping schools at the moment - we need to listen, make changes and deliver great value.
JohnJackson Posted October 21, 2018 Posted October 21, 2018 Colleagues, there is some key feedback here that I need to pick-up with Atomwide. Please rest assured I'm carefully listening at the moment and along with changes to the subscription following feedback from schools, I will make changes to the service to schools if there are frustrations and things getting in the way. Having also researched what schools want there are some really important changes to LGfL in pipeline - very big things which schools will welcome. 1
JohnJackson Posted October 21, 2018 Posted October 21, 2018 Hi, I think Zoom7000 provided a better response than I have. However, please let me know if there are things I can do to make the service better. There are some helpful comments below about the Atomwide provision for us that I need to look into. 1
xicor Posted October 21, 2018 Author Posted October 21, 2018 thank you John, please also consider the firewall situation as this is an absolute major one, I've re-pasted my points below from my previous reply lack of direct control over the firewall - this is causing major problems as it purely relies on a painfully inefficient process to get anything allowed through, had to send them hundreds of IP's the other day just to allow AWS-RDSthrough, also over the weekend i couldn't do anything not able to allow a specific youtube video that is blocked on restricted mode, to do that i have to change the whole category of youtube filtering! lack of remote support tools, again they make the process so painful and over-complicated web screen - might as well use windows NT as even that seems more user friendly automatically blocking Meraki! again I have to send a list of IP's and go through the process Colleagues, there is some key feedback here that I need to pick-up with Atomwide. Please rest assured I'm carefully listening at the moment and along with changes to the subscription following feedback from schools, I will make changes to the service to schools if there are frustrations and things getting in the way. Having also researched what schools want there are some really important changes to LGfL in pipeline - very big things which schools will welcome. 1
JohnJackson Posted October 22, 2018 Posted October 22, 2018 Thanks for raising these matters with me. I have some key meetings with Atomwide in the weeks ahead and its important schools feel supported rather than disempowered. There are some areas where changes may be more difficult than others to resolve but this is very helpful. A new version of Webscreen is due out shortly which should be a significant improvement and something LGfL has been pushing with Atomwide to improve for some time.There are also planned changes for access to information about the LGfL services provided to the schools which will help. 3
DavR Posted October 22, 2018 Posted October 22, 2018 +1 for having greater access to add / edit firewall rules, even if it is only partial access (I understand that Atomwide wouldn't want school contacts having FULL control and compromising security). More often than not, adding a firewall rule is trial and error rather than a clear cut "open port 80 to x", so having to put each adjustment into a change request is a bind.
jmak Posted October 22, 2018 Posted October 22, 2018 thank you John, please also consider the firewall situation as this is an absolute major one, I've re-pasted my points below from my previous reply not able to allow a specific youtube video that is blocked on restricted mode, to do that i have to change the whole category of youtube filtering! Not a comment on LGfL, but we control our YouTube access using GSuite. You'd need to have GSuite set up and to access anything on YouTube users need to be logged in to Google. With AD synchronisation and SSO it's transparent to users. From an admin point of view it's set and forget and (as someone new to GSuite admin) I got it set up in an afternoon. Suitably authorised users (for us it's just me, but you can delegate to any group you choose) when you view a YouTube video you just click on the link to authorise it.
DavR Posted October 22, 2018 Posted October 22, 2018 Wasn't there a trial LGfL product that allowed teachers to authorise and deny individual YouTube videos? You block YouTube for the students, but then there's an LGfL page that they can go to and access the selected videos. I forget what it was called (it wasn't Video Central, that was an attempt to replace YouTube, not harness it), but it seemed a good idea. I guess the fact that I've not heard of it in a while means they stopped developing it.
thebatman Posted October 22, 2018 Posted October 22, 2018 Hiya John, we use your LGfL service up here in the North West and like it a lot, but we do have a few little things that we have raised that would help. At the moment we cant use any of the SSO services as it will require us to change all our users logons to full in line with LGfL/Atomwide naming convention. I feel this could be fix in a number of ways one of which would be to do something like what Google and Microsoft do and use the users email address to make a unique username to use with SSO. 1
Good_Idea Posted October 22, 2018 Posted October 22, 2018 @johnjackson why is there not an LGFL steering group for "Services and Support" or similar? You have the "Executive Board" , "Editorial Board" and "Safeguarding Board" but nothing to steer support site development and the technical/ operational relationship between schools and LGFL/ atomwide, unless i have missed something in LGFL's structure!
mukz Posted October 22, 2018 Posted October 22, 2018 +1 for having greater access to add / edit firewall rules, even if it is only partial access (I understand that Atomwide wouldn't want school contacts having FULL control and compromising security). More often than not, adding a firewall rule is trial and error rather than a clear cut "open port 80 to x", so having to put each adjustment into a change request is a bind. +100 this! It took us nearly three weeks to fix something which i could have done in 10 mins as we had the correct ports and destination addresses. Whilst i completely understand that Atomwide shouldn’t compromise on security, some sort of level of control over firewall rules should be allowed to schools who are competent enough to do so. 2
xicor Posted November 12, 2018 Author Posted November 12, 2018 Hi John is there any update regarding your meeting with Atomwide ? in particular the firewall issues and the lack of not being able to selectively white list certain you tube videos for educational use? Thanks for raising these matters with me. I have some key meetings with Atomwide in the weeks ahead and its important schools feel supported rather than disempowered. There are some areas where changes may be more difficult than others to resolve but this is very helpful. A new version of Webscreen is due out shortly which should be a significant improvement and something LGfL has been pushing with Atomwide to improve for some time.There are also planned changes for access to information about the LGfL services provided to the schools which will help.
xicor Posted November 12, 2018 Author Posted November 12, 2018 same here it took weeks to troubleshoot voip issues and i also had to provide them with 1000s of IP's just to enable a simple sign in app to work as their firewall doesn't allow URL-Port control only IP-Port control +100 this! It took us nearly three weeks to fix something which i could have done in 10 mins as we had the correct ports and destination addresses. Whilst i completely understand that Atomwide shouldn’t compromise on security, some sort of level of control over firewall rules should be allowed to schools who are competent enough to do so.
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