Internet connection - Independent school

[Jamman960]

I work for an independent prep & pre-prep in kent, we currently have BT Business ADSL(up to 8mbit) lines installed on both sites but due to the distance from the exchange we generally get a maximum of 4mbit down and 800k up.

 

I've looked into the cost of leased lines but they're generally coming in at £4k installation followed by £350/month rental for a 2mbit line which is a huge leap from the current £65/month with BT. We are willing to pay more but not quite that much more.

 

Out of interest - what is everyone else using for their connectivity and how big is your budget for it?

[elsiegee40]

We're also an independent in Kent (small pre-prep/Prep)... are you in town or out of town? It makes a huge difference.

 

We've got our line through RM for the filtering. This is historical and I had nothing to do with it... we're in town and getting about 2 meg - but that's because the school won't pay for the full monty (an extra £1k) TBH in a school this size, it seems to be fine... but in a bigger school it would be frustrating.

 

Internet Connections

 

Please PM me if you want to know more!

[kmount]

Several routes really, leased line will be out of your reach so maybe try bonded ADSL lines or does your exchange support LLU (ie, up to 24mbit/s)?

 

Maybe a cable line would be a better approach offering more downstream.

 

As for us, we paid last year £13k for our 10mbit (when it works) leased line with the LA.

[enjay]

If this isn't a silly question, what prompts the desire to change? Are you actually finding 4Mb too slow or are you just thinking you should possibly have higher since lots of other places do??

 

If distance from the exchange is an issue for ADSL, is cable a possibility?

[TronXP]

I work at a Independant school and we used to have 8Mb ADSL line but like yourselves we are to far from the exchange and we were getting betwen 2-4Mb. We bit the bullet and went for an 8Mb leased line from BT. The thing to be aware from BT is that they don't tell you about there "excess charges" on installation. In the end we had £7000 excess installation charges.

 

Now the price is a lot lot more than ADSL but to be honest I think its been worth it. We have a much much more stable line... So far. We've had it in for about a month and testing so far has been good. We are going to release it the rest of the school after half term.

[RabbieBurns]

we use redstone4schools. Its basically just a BT 8meg line with 800kbit upstream, and a filtering proxy, and email. £2000 a year. Stupid money if you ask me, considering BT Business 8meg is about £30 a month and we could do our own filtering.

 

School seems to throw money away in every direction, exept my payslip that is ;p

[Ben_Stanton]

I could only dream of 4Mb. Independent boarding here, at least two light years away from the 'local' exchange.

 

Vigor 3300 load balancing x2 512Mb lines from different ISPs. Also filtering/caching onsite with a Barracuda to ease any latency with using an off-site service service.

 

Obviously not happy with it, but best we can do other than bonded/leased (and we'd still have issues due to distance). Still have room for another 2 lines if needed though.

 

So all in all, paying £90 a month for the two lines. There was the initial outlay for the load balancer/modems and filter which is optional obviously.

 

Ben

[dave.81]

Small independant here, we current have 2x2meg lines bonded through our ISP. I'm not sure you could be further from the exchange than us, we are so far in the sticks that it's not funny.

 

We are moving to 4x2meg lines bonded over the summer as we are doing a lot more remote access to pupils/staff and need the upload speed.

 

ISP is exa-networks have been great for the past couple of years.

[Ben_Stanton]

Small independant here, we current have 2x2meg lines bonded through our ISP. I'm not sure you could be further from the exchange than us, we are so far in the sticks that it's not funny.

 

We are moving to 4x2meg lines bonded over the summer as we are doing a lot more remote access to pupils/staff and need the upload speed.

 

ISP is exa-networks have been great for the past couple of years.

 

Yeah - well we don't even have gas - so neeeer!

[dave.81]

Our nearest shop is 12 miles away so neeeerrrr!!!

[Ben_Stanton]

Our nearest shop is 12 miles away so neeeerrrr!!!

 

Yeah, well get this;

 

This village is so small there is only the school here, plus 100ish houses and 1 pub. I live in the village, ergo, I never actually have to leave. The pub is 100yds of work and home!

 

Ha!

[dave.81]

LOL and back to topic lol

 

Exa-networks have given us great service since we moved to them a couple of years back and the bonded solution does work really well having only 2 meg lines.

[Ben_Stanton]

What are you paying for the bonded pair if you don't mind me asking? You actually have a specific bonding device on-site - not just a load balancer disguised as a bonding unit?

[dave.81]

It's not the cheapest i give you, £900 per line and a management fee of £1200, this is for filtered internet, although we do have filtering on-site too.

 

It runs thorugh a cisco router which does the bonding although the tech side of it i've not been bothered to ask as it works.

[Ben_Stanton]

At that price it must be true MLPPP bonding. What model router is it?

 

Then that's all my questions

[john]

I have an 8mb ADSL line for browsing and anything that goes via the proxyserver and then a 2mb Leased Line for anything else so thats email, web hosting etc

[Michael]

Here in Birmingham we're very lucky. Birmingham City Council have a contract with Telewest I believe (Virgin now) and rolled out 10Mbps fibre to every school. This means each school get a dedicated 1MB/s up and down and is great when it works for downloading huge files.

 

Prior to this, many schools were using standard Business ADSL which was awful when so many users were browsing/downloading content.

 

At home I'm currently getting 7616Kbps as I am under 1km from my exchange and that's with Orange.

 

The alternative if fibre is too expensive is SDSL if your exchange supports it? Many businesses/schools can benefit with a higher upload speed.

[dave.81]

At that price it must be true MLPPP bonding. What model router is it?

 

Then that's all my questions

 

It's a Cisco 1800 series router

 

Our account manager is Matther Connor, [email protected] if you want to know more he's the man in the know.

 

We are looking at expanding our connection up to 4x2meg over the summer. We cover the cost by adding a small sum termly to the fee's and this covers the cost of the internet.