Aspire ISP

[sippo]

In two weeks we are moving to Aspire with a S10 Smoothwall working as a Firewall and Webfiltering for our new MPLS.

 

All our primaries are getting leased 100mb lines. Secondary getting a 1000mbps. I am looking forward to superfast connections. Some of our primaries only have 60 kids in!

 

We are one of the first customers in the south, and so far they have been excellent with updates and communication which are previous supplier lacked!

[Steve21]

Sounds interesting! Any further details on them? Pricing etc if you can say anything on it, always nice to see what’s available outside the “norm”

 

Steve

[Katy]

We use Aspire (assuming it's the same one, based in Gateshead), our connection is provided over Virgin but don't think we've had any problems or any downtime that I've noticed yet (we're about a year in so far on a 1Gb/1Gb connection). Roughly £7k a year (think it's just under) + VAT.

[sippo]

We use Aspire (assuming it's the same one, based in Gateshead), our connection is provided over Virgin but don't think we've had any problems or any downtime that I've noticed yet (we're about a year in so far on a 1Gb/1Gb connection). Roughly £7k a year (think it's just under) + VAT.

 

I won't put what we pay for our secondary as that won't be fair, but it is cheap. I couldn't get over how cheap.

 

A nice added bonus is that they offer free SIP trunks as well. This is our next project.

[Katy]

I won't put what we pay for our secondary as that won't be fair, but it is cheap. I couldn't get over how cheap.

 

A nice added bonus is that they offer free SIP trunks as well. This is our next project.

 

Probably worth adding to my post the price obviously varies by location and won't be the same now as it was a year ago

[sippo]

Can I just add, that we are now 3 or so months in and it is an absolute dream to have a stable connection. Speed is superb. Their support is great. Even noticed a router down due to a powercut before we even knew! Nice to have good support.

[Primus]

Yup, we've used Aspire for years, they're top notch.

[2097]

Can I just add, that we are now 3 or so months in and it is an absolute dream to have a stable connection. Speed is superb. Their support is great. Even noticed a router down due to a powercut before we even knew! Nice to have good support.

 

Do you have any literature on what you purchased.

 

We currently have a 100mbit BT with DDOS protection and we pay for smooth wall filtering.

 

Be very nice to get all that under one package and a lot cheaper !

 

I assume Aspire have DDOS protection on their nodes.

[Steve21]

Out of curiosity, those of you on Aspire, do any of you have 2 lines from them, but from different suppliers?

 

Looking forward to network revamp, and thinking if we're going mainly cloud it'd be good to have 2 "real" lines in split by firewall etc for redundancy, rather than main + adsl etc

 

Thanks,

Steve

[Guest Guest]

Out of curiosity, those of you on Aspire, do any of you have 2 lines from them, but from different suppliers?

 

Looking forward to network revamp, and thinking if we're going mainly cloud it'd be good to have 2 "real" lines in split by firewall etc for redundancy, rather than main + adsl etc

 

Thanks,

Steve

Surely if you want proper redundancy you'd be better off using 2 service providers not 2 connections via the same provider but via different carriers

[Steve21]

Surely if you want proper redundancy you'd be better off using 2 service providers not 2 connections via the same provider but via different carriers

 

That’s what I was asking about They sit on top of other providers so could have one on virgin and one on Openreach etc

 

Steve

[Guest Guest]

That’s what I was asking about [emoji14] They sit on top of other providers so could have one on virgin and one on Openreach etc

 

Steve

I worded that badly, surely you'd be better off using 2 different ISP? If you have 2 circuits via say Virgin and Open reach and use a single ISP, if the ISP has issues it could take both offline

[sippo]

Out of curiosity, those of you on Aspire, do any of you have 2 lines from them, but from different suppliers?

 

Looking forward to network revamp, and thinking if we're going mainly cloud it'd be good to have 2 "real" lines in split by firewall etc for redundancy, rather than main + adsl etc

 

Thanks,

Steve

 

Yes. Our primary lease lines are either Sky or Talk Talk, and then BT has a backup.

[Wave9_Lee]

Correct, ideally you don't want two different carriers ending up in the same data centre cluster of your service provider. You may have physical separacy locally, but at the aggregation point you're relying on your service provider having multiple redundancies, properly configured and tested. We provide carrier and ISP indepedence for this reason. Ideally your 2 carriers would be on different infrastructure i.e. Openreach plus VMB. Double check that VMB aren't actually using Openreach tails, as is sometimes the case where they don't have their own fibre. If you can't afford 2 x fibre, then an fttc/fttp is a good shout as although it's Openreach tail, it uses different infrastructure back to the exchange and different kit and backhaul in the exchange too.

 

Incidentally we configure our backup line as active-active, so you get the use of both day to day, load balanced in whatever priorities you need.