Speed for secondary school

[sippo]

Hypothetical question (possibly). If you are a secondary school of approx 1500 users and you want to move ALL you services to a cloud solution with no server hardware on site, what broadband speed would you provision.

 

It maybe hard to call, but I am thinking 100mb wouldn't be enough. Imaging would use a lot of it?

[PotNoodleTech]

I would provision 1 gig for that.

[mrbios]

Ideal scenario, two 1 gig links to two separate local exchanges. Cost wise that's rarely an option, so 1 gig.

[MartinT]

We are on 300M for a school of 300 users, so that scales to around 1G for your size.

[dhicks]

Hypothetical question (possibly). If you are a secondary school of approx 1500 users and you want to move ALL you services to a cloud solution with no server hardware on site, what broadband speed would you provision.

 

We're a medium-sized primary (prep) school, currently with some on-site servers but moving more over to be cloud-based. We currently have a 200Mbps fibre connection, so that's 200Mbps both down and up, and this is on a gigabit fibre carrier, so we have the option to upgrade to a gigabit if needed. We've been thinking to upgrade to 500Mbps when it next comes round to contract renewal, mainly because there's little difference in price these days between 200Mbps and 500Mbps.

 

For a secondary school, if possible I'd try and get a gigabit connection on a 10 gigabit carrier, giving you the option to add more bandwidth in the future if needed.

[sippo]

Wow. This is going to be expensive. We currently use 60% of a 100mb/1gb leased line.

[msi_school]

We are a secondary school of approx 1500 pupils with a 100mb connection and we are finding it constricting for normal usage with all our servers on site, I would agree with @AButters that you want a gig and a hefty backup connection.

[MartinT]

You want all your eggs in the cloud basket. You can't have that and a slow connection or else you'll get no end of complaints that it was a bad move.

[CHiLL]

We are a secondary of about 650 students and on a 200Mb Up/Down over a 1Gb pipe. For us, that seems fine, I don't think we max it out that often.

[maark]

1GB connection prices have come down a lot.

You would really want a backup/failover if you are moving all to cloud.

[Rob_D]

We're 1500 student school (so around 2000 users) and with just office 365 cloud stuff (email, onedrive and some sharepoint) we work our 1gb connection pretty hard (especially around lesson change when everyone's saving and opening documents, etc).

Back 6ish years ago, we were on 100mb connection (and only really using O365 outlook) and we could quite easily saturate the connection (although normally only for short periods)

So I'd agree with the others, and wouldn't recommend less that 1gb primary line.

Also backup line is a must if you're going full cloud, ideally with a different physical rout in.

[TechMonkey]

To give an alternative view, go for a half or quarter step. Companies are more than happy to bump your speed up, but will not drop your speed down.

 

The important bit is that you have a 1Gig bearer. So maybe go for 250Mb or 500MB, and see how that goes.

 

Obviously check with your provider what hoops you have to jump through to increase and if there are any penalties, but when we were looking at this they all said they would happily increase with no additional costs except the additional bandwidth.

 

Another option would be to get two half speed connections and balance the load. That way you have your redundancy, you have your full speed and if anything goes wrong your users will only notice some slow down, but importantly you aren't paying for twice as much as you need. This will still work out more expensive than a single connection, obviously, but at least you aren't paying for capacity you won't use for the majority of the time. Also don't forget that to run a line from a separate exchange, especially a redundant line that doesn't follow the same route, will be more expensive than the first line as you aren't using the path of least resistance, or the path of least engineering time/screaming.

[mthomas08]

I would provision 1 gig for that.

 

This.

 

We currently have a 200MB broadband connection and it sits on average of 100MB and peaks around 130-140MB. This used to be 50MB and hit the cap almost every lesson.

 

Still save 95% on site and install locally. Our network is 1GB and when it was 100MB things would grind to a halt far too often.

 

I would settle for nothing less than 1GB if we went Cloud. What I would do though is consider a single year or certain staff on a Cloud system setup and review how things go. Possible the year 7s because in the 1st year they will have the least amount of work saved and smallest files.

[sippo]

So on average, what should 1gb/1gb cost per annum? I pay around £6.5k PA for 100mb.

[synaesthesia]

Meh, there's so little difference between 100mb on a gig bearer and a full gig it's not really worth going any lower for a secondary. We're on 200mbit, don't really have any constrictions but with larger mobile device usage and ever increasing cloud reliance going to a gig is a no-brainer. Not even a grand a year difference.

[mrbios]

So on average, what should 1gb/1gb cost per annum? I pay around £6.5k PA for 100mb.

 

The last time i asked my ISP about increasing from 300 to 500mb, they told me it was actually cheaper to go straight to 1gb (no idea why) I pay about the same as you but for 300mb at the moment, i think it was an extra 3k a year roughly to go up to 1gb.

 

Differs from county to county quite drastically though. Closer you are to cities = cheaper.

[Ditto]

From @TechMonkey "Another option would be to get two half speed connections and balance the load. That way you have your redundancy, you have your full speed" - seems like a sensible approach - anyone doing this already? Either way, as many others have indicated, 1Gb is highly recommended if price differences are minimal.

[synaesthesia]

Not a bad idea, price could be minimal if using the same carrier however that would defeat the point considerably. If you have 2 lines from 2 carriers you're in a world of pain, expense-wise!

[TechMonkey]

Not a bad idea, price could be minimal if using the same carrier however that would defeat the point considerably. If you have 2 lines from 2 carriers you're in a world of pain, expense-wise!

 

Depends on what you are trying to off set. Phantom JCBs eating your line would be offset by just a line coming from a different exchange using a different route. Complete telecoms meltdown would only be offset by a different carrier. Workout cost and likelihood and see if it is worth it. Former example I would say is likely to happen, latter example is less likely to happen.

[mavhc]

1Gb is only twice the cost of 100Mb, so no reason to get less. Then get another 1Gb from someone else, going via a different physical route, for only 4x the cost. Pref not also using Openreach.

[Wave9_Lee]

You should speak to your provider to rule in or out any options. If you're a month into a 3 year term, it's a different answer to being in month 30. A new Gbps link could cost between £4.5 - £10k depending where you are. We're frequently offering 1Gbps for the price of 500Mbps, so sometimes it's not worth going up in half steps. A second link is a good idea, but budget is a big factor here. Anyone in month 30 of a 3 year contract now, (especially on some LA contracts) is likely to be able to afford 2 x Fibre ethernet services for their current annual bill.

 

As others have said, using different exchanges can be expensive and take time. Unless you are happy to pay for east/west different ingerss into the building, you will often be using same or adjacent duct.

 

If you're lucky to be in the right area, you can look at an openreach (BT) tail, and a VMB tail, but resilience is all about cost-vs-risk. A risk analysis would (generally) show that the impact of an ethernet fibre failure is high, but the risk should be very low (availability is approx 99.95%) so would you want to pay thousands for a service you might not need? It's often sensible to use a backup FttC, because although this isn't enough to run the whole school;

 

it's cheap

it's on a different network

you can load-balance and use both links (which at 80mbps isn't bad)

it can be configured to mainly transport key traffic in the event of a Fibre failure, so that the school 'business' can keep operating

 

Target fix time on an Ethernet fibre service is between 5-6 hours. Ironically 'big' outages of multiple sites often get fixed the quickest : )

[mikeprice]

Some time ago I was involved in disaster planning for a large company - one of the problems we came across was working out how to ensure that the backup line actually goes through different cables etc

 

I came across a bank (who are very concerned about data) who tried this - only to find that, even though there were 2 cables going out of different ends of the building - it all ended up in the same box by the end of the road - and the same cable after that

They found this out when a JCB (other idiot powered machine are available - as are JCBs powered by non-idiots) dug up the cable and wiped out both 'separate' lines in one move

 

TLDR - it ain't that easy to ensure that backups are separate once they leave the building

[TechMonkey]

Some time ago I was involved in disaster planning for a large company - one of the problems we came across was working out how to ensure that the backup line actually goes through different cables etc

 

I came across a bank (who are very concerned about data) who tried this - only to find that, even though there were 2 cables going out of different ends of the building - it all ended up in the same box by the end of the road - and the same cable after that

They found this out when a JCB (other idiot powered machine are available - as are JCBs powered by non-idiots) dug up the cable and wiped out both 'separate' lines in one move

 

TLDR - it ain't that easy to ensure that backups are separate once they leave the building

 

Ah, further ingress of the North American Fibre Seeking Backhoe.

 

When getting a backup line survey if you state that is what it is for, the engineers should try and plan it that way. If they don't I think in an emergency the company would have a case against the company. But sometimes there is no option.

[dhicks]

TLDR - it ain't that easy to ensure that backups are separate once they leave the building

 

Is anyone else using / thinking of using any kind of wireless connection as a backup? We're in central London, Three's new 5G broadband service is available in this area - separate from their mobile phone network, this is what used to be Relish Broadband. I use the slightly older 4G service at home - it's fine for home broadband, you can stream videos and so on, although the upload speed isn't very good and ping time is poor (SSH connections don't stay open due to timeout issues). I figure the 5G service might be a bit faster / snazzier, and would provide a basic backup connection - if the main fibre connection goes down we would at least have enough of a connection to connect to the MIS and send emails and so on.

[Norphy]

We've just opened a new school in Borough. At the moment, until we can get something more permanent in, we're using a Vodafone 5G internet connection to connect the school to the internet and to the rest of the MAT's network via a VPN tunnel.

 

It's not bad, all things considered. They're getting about 200mbps down, 20mbps up which is OK for the amount of students that the school has at the moment. That said, the Smoothwall at the school doesn't seem to happy to be behind the ISP provided router, people there get a lot of "connection reset" errors.