Broadband Leased Lines

[caffrey]

We currently have 300Mb internet on a 1Gb bearer and the renewal has just come up, I'm not sure what's happened in the last 3 years but it seems I can get 1Gb on a 1Gb bearer for less than the cost we paid for the 300Mb from a different supplier. Using our current supplier we can get 500Mb for the same cost as the 300Mb

 

I can't even imagine 1Gb internet...

 

Does this sound right ?

[john]

Yep prices are falling and you can never have enough internet

 

Just ensure your firewalling and filtering is up to the internet speed and what it does when you max its limits does it just fail open and unfilter etc or will it throttle or time out as that is often forgotten so get this amazing fast internet and people really start to use it and then you find it slows and dies due to an underspec'd firewall

[caffrey]

Yeah I think that's the hurdle, all the internet facing boxes have 1Gb nics - they might just not be able to cope with the full b/w

[Wave9_Lee]

Hi Caffrey,

 

yes, there's been a marked reduction in fibre pricing in the last 12 months. As John says, one of the key things is to make sure you're firewall and filtering can cope (if it's on-prem). Datasheets might say throughput is OK, but of course, depends on how much processing and analysis the box is doing. Of course, if you're upgrading to 1Gbps from 1/2/300 just because it's super cheap (i.e. not coz you are maxing out) you probably won't hit the Gbps for some time.

 

Happy to provide a price for comparison if you'd like.

 

cheers

[nathan]

Worth having a look to see if you can get CityFibre connections in your location.

[AlanD]

...and don't forget you web filter may have speed limits. Our smoothwall seems to flatten out somewhere between 200 and 300 Mb/s.

[caffrey]

Hardware or software restriction ? @AlanD We use our own hardware here

[Primus]

AlanD is talking about a hardware restriction - the more powerful Smoothwall appliances are required for higher speed connections.

 

Eg. we had to go for an S-14 for gigabit as the S-10 model at the time either didn't exist or hadn't been updated to be powerful enough to be able to handle gigabit.

[caffrey]

We run Smoothwall on an old SE316M1 with 2 x E5520 xeons and 12 gig of ram - I've been planning on moving to Sophos for a while but just haven't got round to it

[SchoolsBroadband]

Prices have certainly gone down quite a lot over the past 12 months. We see most secondary schools taking a full 1Gbit connection now.

 

Although CityFibre had the upper hand on pricing on 1Gbit circuits 12 months ago I don't see that being so going forward as we see both BT and Virgin now being similar wholesale pricing and then there's Dark Fibre which we can do too.

@Primus is right regarding UTM boxes. I can't comment on Smoothwall or Sophos but i'd say never trust the tech specs. We've put Fortigate firewalls in testing labs and got nowhere near the UTM throughput they're supposed to do in real world scenarios with multiple functions turned on. We have seen this occur specifically when customers going to high speed lines that their firewalls can't keep up.

 

This is why we have very big cloud hosted and virtualised Fortigate firewalls so if you need to up your bandwidth from say 300Mbit to 1Gbit then no problem we just open the taps a bit more and give you more resource so you don't have to buy a new Firewall

 

Thanks

 

Dave

 

P.S if you need a quote feel free to send me a PM as I know we'll be competitive