Consistently poor experience with EXA Networks

[epoch_roots]

Our internet is up and down today but it's been like this for a few months now.

It's been multiple issues from the stormshield they supplied not being able to handle our load to their R&D team deploying updates that bring their network down or their filtering product deciding to stop working. Today apparently its a hardware failure as I'm guessing they have zero redundancy in their network.

We've also looked for opinions on schoolsbroadband but they have similar issues from what I'm told. The issues aren't localised to us as we have another school around the corner that gets hit at the same time.

 

I don't get it - they seem to get a lot love here which is probably the most perplexing part.

 

I couldn't see them functioning as an organisation for very long if they were offering services to corporate entities. They'd be bankrupted by paying out for SLA breaches. Where does the love come from and why does everyone tolerate the service they provide? We're stuck with them for the next 9 months and I can't see it improving at all.

 

Sorry if this is looks like a rant but I've come from Industry and had maybe two or three instances of downtime in 10 years compared to the 2 or 3 this week alone with Exa.

[FN-GM]

We inherited a school that used Schools Broadband. I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole. Very unreliable, over priced and poor customer service. The replacement is much cheaper, quicker and more reliable.

[howartp]

We've just signed up with Exa last week.

 

Quote from a local network manager "Over my dead body will I ever leave Exa for our internet provision".

[Fazza]

I don't get it - they seem to get a lot love here which is probably the most perplexing part.

 

I agree! Everybody seems to love them and say they are great but they're not. Since switching over to them we are not able to use the Microsoft Store and they cant fix it - we have to tell Teachers to take their laptops home to use the Microsoft Store which is nuts! If you ring up to report problems and they dont like the sound of them they dont bother logging them (they deny this of course - but this is just burying your head in the sand)!

[DJ-1701]

At our Primary that uses Exa we have had a more serious proxy issue yesterday, but issues like that are few and far between, everything is fine today, but looking at https://status.exa.net.uk/ there does appear to be some issues going on. @exa_mark, might be worth having a look at this thread.

 

We use Quantum filtering with a Stormshield box onsite. Only minor niggles I have is having to power cycle the Stormshield from time to time if there is no Internet connection, or maybe a brief blip with Surfprotect proxy where usually refreshing the page sorts everything out.

 

@Fazza, I haven't had any issue with the Microsoft Store at all, we are using the Education version. Is that the one you are using as well?

[synaesthesia]

Always heard good things about Exa, however haven't used them for a while, however despite having had a negative overall experience with Schools Broadband they certainly seem to have improved since we left! (and our primaries seem much happier).

[mikkydoos]

Zen Internet here all the way. Extremely reliable service and support is A1++.

[localzuk]

My advice? Stop buying a "package" of internet + filtering. Buy a bare line for internet, and then buy filtering on top. We use a Sophos UTM for our firewall/filtering, but there are plenty of options on the market.

[k-strider]

i have mixed views about EXA I've always found them helpful when calling or emailing them... not so sure about the Stormshield firewall I'm sure even when we aren't maxing out our pipe the net can still feel sluggish and im convinced its the firewall struggling with the decryption and inspection.

 

I'd like to go to a bare line and in-rack filtering solution but to scared at the Mo... i use Zen at home who are first rate, with a Sophos UTM (as its free for personal use)...

[round2it]

exa has been great for the past year but the last few weeks we have had some issues with surf protect falling on its backside.

 

came in this morning to no internet for staff but unfiltered connection was fine so the surfprotect was faulty. sorted after a rollback by the developers 10mins after call to support.

 

exa are a great company support is fantastic, and the product is good yes they have had a few issues but name me one isp that has not.

 

i am happy with speed and cost. and i no longer have to deal with the YHGFL. you would know poor service if you ever had a connection from them.

Edited December 18, 2018 by round2it

[IrritableTech]

My advice? Stop buying a "package" of internet + filtering. Buy a bare line for internet, and then buy filtering on top. We use a Sophos UTM for our firewall/filtering, but there are plenty of options on the market.

 

I don't fully agree with this statement. Packages can be very cost effective and for a great number of schools they need to contact one 'internet' company in the event of an issue.

 

When listening to feedback work out exactly what part of the package that customer is using and how happy (or not) they are with each element. Practically every supplier uses the same handful of wholesalers and therefore connectivity wise they are likely to be closely matched as a result. It's the other elements of the offering which add value and possibly some frustrations too.

[mikkydoos]

My advice? Stop buying a "package" of internet + filtering. Buy a bare line for internet, and then buy filtering on top. We use a Sophos UTM for our firewall/filtering, but there are plenty of options on the market.

 

Yep. But the option of cloud filtering offered by some ISP's looks tempting for smaller organisations... although there's no shortage of them either.

 

 

 

but the last few weeks we have had some issues with surf protect falling on its backside.

 

I've never had an outage from the last two ISP's I've chosed ... Virgin and Zen re-selling Virgin. Might be due to a well covered location though.

Edited December 19, 2018 by mikkydoos

[howartp]

exa has been great for the past year but the last few weeks we have had some issues with surf protect falling on its backside.

 

came in this morning to no internet for staff but unfiltered connection was fine so the surfprotect was faulty. sorted after a rollback by the developers 10mins after call to support.

 

exa are a great company support is fantastic, and the product is good yes they have had a few issues but name me one isp that has not.

 

i am happy with speed and cost. and i no longer have to deal with the YHGFL. you would know poor service if you ever had a connection from them.

 

Great response.

 

I’ve just ordered EXA but keeping (renewing on new contract with new box) the Smoothwall UTM we currently have.

[hallb15]

We have Exa here using Surfprotect Quantum on their Darklight 300 fibre service. There have been some issues the past couple of weeks, but largely we have been unaffected.

We moved to an FTTC connection with Exa from the awful Leeds Learning Network in 2014. We had some issues as SSL traffic increased as the Stormshield firewall couldn't handle it. Since moving to Darklight we use our own Unifi Secure Gateway Pro, which is a vast improvement over the old Stormshield device.

I find support very good, sometimes I get the impression they are very busy and can take a little while to respond, but 95% of the time they are very quick and helpful.

They are also very competitive pricewise - we certainly couldn't afford a 300Mb fibre connection with anyone else when we signed up.

[Zoom7000]

I'm a huge supporter of LGfL/TRUSTnet. In my opinion, LGfL/TRUSTnet bring the most value added product for schools. If anything, these days, robust and stable broadband is their most basic offering! You now get some amazing products bundled in to the package for free:

 

Free Meraki MDM licenses (300 for primaries, 700 for for secondaries)

Free Sophos Anti-Virus with Intercept X

Free Sophos Server Advanced Anti-Virus with Intercept X

Free User Provisioning for G Suite and Office 365

Free Neverware Cloud Ready licenses (30 for primaries, 100 for secondaries) with discounts for further licenses

Free Malwarebytes licenses

Free Egress Switch licenses (5 for primaries, 15 for secondaries)

Built in fully cloud based web filtering

Free training on lots of key curriculum areas in schools (delivered at LGfL HQ or at your school by one of the LGfL curriculum experts)

Free training on Office 365, G Suite (delivered at LGfL HQ or at your school by one of the LGfL Digital Cloud Champions)

100s of free curriculum content via the LGfL Content platform

Free entry to the LGfL Conference - Annual curriculum conference

Free entry to the LGfL Digisafe Conference - Annual Safeguarding conference

 

And these are just the ones I can recall off the top of my head!

 

Under the leadership of @JohnJackson, LGfL have grown and improved leaps and bounds and some of the prospective new features, upgrades and packages coming are gonna make it, what I think, is one of the best all round broadband package to schools!

[epoch_roots]

exa are a great company support is fantastic, and the product is good yes they have had a few issues but name me one isp that has not.

 

This is 100% the mentality I'm trying to understand. Most ISPs don't have issues, especially not due to the lack of QA on their products or downtime coming from simple hardware failure. If they do it is rare instead of weekly/monthly.

It just seems like 'battered wife syndrome' and I'm curious why people are not only happy to accept the level of service we've received but actively encourage other people to get on board.

 

I've worked in SaaS and I get that deployment issues happen, but that's why we'd send out an 'at risk' notification to our customers. Exas approach seems to be 'hey lets push this live without telling anyone and see what happens' - it's incredibly unprofessional.

[Oaktech]

We don't have internet with them so I can't comment on them as an ISP, but they manage the DNS for one of our legacy domains and I've noticed the complete opposite. A couple of years ago it would take, maybe, 4 messages of:

 

'I want XXX change'

'No, not YYY change'

'No, really, just do XXX'

'No NOT that. Just type this into your box *type exact change as if I was doing it myself*'

'Finally, Thankyou!'

 

To get a DNS change done, and they would accept change requests from anyone with the right email address.

 

Now, they request verification of every change from me or my boss, changes take about 20 minutes and they're done right first time. If you aren't comfortable managing your own DNS then I would have no problem recommending them as an MSP for that.

[round2it]

My experience of exa networks over the year we have had them has been very good especially having suffered years of pain with the yhgfl I will not accept down time but the odd glitch is not the end of the world at least they are moving forward and trying to improve an already good product.

 

But just of late the glitches have been a little too often just the last couple of weeks but the rest of the year the connection has been rock solid.

 

The support guys at exa are fantastic they are always available and sort any of your requests quickly and effectively (the help desk system kinda sucks ) But email support is good no issues here, they even go above and beyond to help schools out.

 

Agree an email to say when upgrades happen would be nice.

[Fazza]

I have a problem with my backend on a daily basis. The internet connection itself has never gone down as emails have always continued to work when their filtering system routinely fails.

[mavhc]

Just started with Exa a few months ago, not had internet fail, although SurfProtect Quantum gives me a "something has gone wrong" message maybe once or twice a day, a reload of the web page fixes it.

 

They suggested we get Fortigate firewalls, I got them and configured them myself, they've been great, apart from licencing being too complicated.

 

The Surfprotect web internet is pretty good, although sometimes it just says "error" when you don't have permission, instead of saying why, phoned them and they did the thing I didn't have permission for.

 

Main issue is the database of categories of websites isn't great, have to reclassify quite often.

 

Did find a bug with the classification, http://google..com/ gets stuck in a loop, it doesn't realise it's not a domain name and give up, but they didn't seem interested in fixing it.

 

Other problem is there's not timed scheduled category changes, I want to allow games at break time, so got a massive hack going on with wpad and fortigate proxy, which breaks Edge, but hey, another reason to tell people not to use Edge

[hallb15]

My experience of exa networks over the year we have had them has been very good especially having suffered years of pain with the yhgfl I will not accept down time but the odd glitch is not the end of the world at least they are moving forward and trying to improve an already good product.

 

But just of late the glitches have been a little too often just the last couple of weeks but the rest of the year the connection has been rock solid.

 

The support guys at exa are fantastic they are always available and sort any of your requests quickly and effectively (the help desk system kinda sucks ) But email support is good no issues here, they even go above and beyond to help schools out.

 

Agree an email to say when upgrades happen would be nice.

 

You can subscribe to status updates here: https://status.exa.net.uk/subscribe

[Fazza]

The Surfprotect web internet is pretty good

 

How can it be 'pretty good' when you also said this in the same thread:

 

 

SurfProtect Quantum gives me a "something has gone wrong" message maybe once or twice a day

 

sometimes it just says "error" when you don't have permission, instead of saying why

 

the database of categories of websites isn't great, have to reclassify quite often.

 

Did find a bug with the classification, http://google..com/ gets stuck in a loop, it doesn't realise it's not a domain name and give up, but they didn't seem interested in fixing it.

 

 

Personally I think it's pretty awful.

 

 

When we were looking to change ISP pretty much everything on EduGeed said they were pretty good and we didnt realise pretty good meant people were putting up with problems, we thought it meant no problems.

 

Our users are used to getting a message saying there is a problem with the backend that most dont report it to us any more, not getting on to a website 2 or 3 times a day has become the norm.

[MatthewL]

Reading between all the lines with these issues (in all threads) there always seems to be be fault with the filtering/proxy side of things. If it was me I would get a plain old internet line from said company and manage my own filtering to take all this out of the equation. Those of you that say you are having issues with EXA do you have a PC on a plain internet connection you can use to test when having these issues? Do you run any monitoring on connectivity internally and externally and see when these things drop?

[mikkydoos]

I have a problem with my backend on a daily basis.

 

 

Yuk! Keep that to yourself @Fazza

[synaesthesia]

Reading between all the lines with these issues (in all threads) there always seems to be be fault with the filtering/proxy side of things. If it was me I would get a plain old internet line from said company and manage my own filtering to take all this out of the equation. Those of you that say you are having issues with EXA do you have a PC on a plain internet connection you can use to test when having these issues? Do you run any monitoring on connectivity internally and externally and see when these things drop?

 

I concur, however will add it won't hurt to get a bundle from someone who knows what they're doing. For instance, with Wave9 they provide us a Sophos XG and on installation give us the option of having it basically fully managed by them, leaving it entirely to us to fiddle with/break, or a mixture. As it's a hardware box on site, we're free to do as we wish with it and are also safe in the knowledge that support from the guys at W9 is good enough to get a quick & reliable answer regarding the filtering if we need it; upshot of this is we have a bundle with support for both but don't have to put up with issues regarding cloud filtering which seems to be more of a factor than bundled filtering.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Yuk! Keep that to yourself @Fazza

 

Thought I could smell something down here and just assumed the water supply round here was flaky again!