Exa or Schools Broadband?

[MrWu]

Hi all

 

I have 2 runners up for our ISP : Exa / Schools Broadband

 

All close in pricing and both have had good feedback.

 

Just as a final nudge to decision making have any of you folks here are a customer of either, and what are your experiences?

 

Many thanks!

[fiza]

@MrWu - have you done a search for both companies on Edugeek? I think both are Edugeek sponsors and there is quite a lot of feedback about both.

[synaesthesia]

How about @Wave9 ?

[snagrat]

Schools Broadband have a much better firewall solution, in my opinion.

 

If you are or will be going down the MAT route then they seem to be able to do a lot more without too much additional work.

[Jawloms]

I'm with SchoolsBroadband. Had massive struggles when we switched to them getting emails to work, to the point of I was threatening to leave them and not pay them a penny, once it was sorted we have been exceedingly happy with them. We have had literally no downtime at all.

[Wubbalubbadub]

I always recomend Schools Broadband, since the new inline netsweeper, im pretty happy! :-)

 

Schools Broadband have had there problems in the past with filtering etc, but the customer service has always been top notch.

 

Exa i have used in the past, and been stable - but the customer service is somewhat to be desired!

Edited January 28, 2019 by Wubbalubbadub

[synaesthesia]

To be fair, the new platform seems to be considerably better to the point I've recommended them to one of my primaries

[SchoolsBroadband]

+1 for Schools Broadband

 

Thanks for all the kind words and to you too Nick

 

 

and yes, the Netsweeper filtering and Fortigate firewall has had 100% uptime since its inception.

 

Dave

[MrWu]

Thank you all for your feedback, just looking at pros and cons for each, but it looks like you can't go wrong with either company.. its down to the content filter quality now

[SchoolsBroadband]

@MrWu we did win best security at the last two Internet Service Provider Awards for our hosted Fortigate and Netsweeper filtering platform to the education sectorbeating a lot of other major providers

 

See https://www.ispa.org.uk/ispa-awards/previous-winners/2018-2/

 

and I quote

 

"Security Award: Talk Straight

Winning for the second year running, the judges felt that Talk Straight’s focus on schools, starting the education and awareness on the importance of cyber security as early as possible, along with impressive customer support, made them deserved winners."

 

But even better I'd suggest speaking with @snagrat and co.

 

Thanks for considering us.

 

Dave

[MrWu]

@MrWu we did win best security at the last two Internet Service Provider Awards for our hosted Fortigate and Netsweeper filtering platform to the education sectorbeating a lot of other major providers

 

See https://www.ispa.org.uk/ispa-awards/previous-winners/2018-2/

 

and I quote

 

"Security Award: Talk Straight

Winning for the second year running, the judges felt that Talk Straight’s focus on schools, starting the education and awareness on the importance of cyber security as early as possible, along with impressive customer support, made them deserved winners."

 

But even better I'd suggest speaking with @snagrat and co.

 

Thanks for considering us.

 

Dave

 

Thanks Dave..

 

Welcome onboard !

 

Special thanks to Maria for talking to me about the filter and she is looking into sorting me out a temporary proxy while we migrate from Sonicwall CFS which will expire.

 

Anyone reading this thread both Exa and Schools broadband has excellent references and pre sales for both were great, it was a very close decision with Netsweeper just clinched it with its user reporting capability for BYOD..

[azureusnation]

Just passing and wanted so say give Shayne at Novatech a call. He has been nothing but an angel with our tender process, smoothwall and MPLS connectivity for our trust.

[mavhc]

I've not used SB, but Exa have been pretty good.

 

Once OpenReach actually installed the lines Exa posted me a https://store.ui.com/products/edgerouter-pro for each site.

 

Each site has 16 IPs, I bought my own Fortigates and configure different external IPs for different uses, one is for adult guest use, no https interception, another for devices without AD integration, one for VPN etc. The IPs are integrated into the Surfprotect dashboard, so can just pick them and assign stuff (although did have to phone to get https interception turned off, for security sake)

 

Their script does an export of AD users and groups, and locally looks for changes every 10 mins, uploads new copies to sync with SurfProtect, works well, I add trusted students to a YouTube AD group easily.

 

Transparent proxy if no other proxy is set, so don't have to set a proxy in every single application that can't read system settings.

 

There's no time based filtering yet, had to hack that in so games are enabled at break times.

 

A few problems with SurfProtect being overloaded, mostly fixed now.

 

Mostly down to price, for 100/100 Wave9 were £3800 (but then had to pay for filtering product), Exa £4250 (+£100 for AD based filtering), and SB were £4750 (+£350 for per user reporting)