Where do you get your internet from?

[mrhall]

We're a school in East Sussex - currently on a 500Mbs county provided broadband.

 

They've had some issues this term - so in a week with year 8 isolating at home, and us trying to deliver lessons remotely, we had two days with county-failure - so no internet.

 

County had some DDOS issues - so they changed firewall settings to prevent the hacking problem - which meant we lost the ability to receive external email for 4 days.

 

So we wonder about a different source of broadband....

 

Would welcome recommendations.

 

Thanks

[6Foot2]

The school I left recently took the LEA provided service (HfL)

 

They recently upgraded the bearer, so they can upgrade to 1Gbps with no additional cost (apart from the cost of any extra bandwidth) They recently moved up from 200 Mbps to 300 Mbps.

 

They don't look like they will be moving away any time soon. The connection has been steady with one short outage recently and one longer outage (an hour or so?) sometime within the last year (can't recall exactly when)

[BKGarry]

We moved (the Wednesday before lockdown was our changeover date) to Wave 9, better service !,# support, more bandwidth (1gps fttp and a 80mbps fttc backup lins), our own onsite filtering and firewall (a sophos XG) for less than what we would have been paying the LEA for 200mbps.

[Jcx500]

Still on our LEA Connection

[Andycat]

BT Net. Been very solid for last 5 years, so gone with them again.

[willtech]

LGfL With great benefits

[howartp]

Moved to Exa Networks Fibre 1Gig up/down 18 months ago, from NYCC NyNet.

 

Only had one outage in that time to my recall, in the middle of summer holidays.

[Rob_D]

We've been using Cavendish (https://www.cavcoms.com/) since Easter without any major issues (2*1GB sync connections), reasonable price and great service. Before that, we had Exponential-E (https://www.exponential-e.com/) good service no real issues but not as competitive on the price when we came to renew - before that we were with them for about 6 years.

[Katy]

We were using a Gamma provided 100Mbps connection which was rock solid, we have since changed to Aspire provided 1Gbps - again rock solid but things like ping times are higher than on the Gamma link (but it was the cheapest we could find, it's over a Virgin connection, which itself is over OpenReach as there's no virgin in the area).

[chris11256]

We have a BT net line here, it's a 1Gbps bearer but 500Mbps port speed. Probably pricey by todays standards(9K a year) and we're contracted until 2022.

 

No major outages, although we had an odd incident on Friday where the connection seemed to die for 5 minutes then come back again, called BT who said they couldn't see anything.

 

Am happy with them overall, although probably won't end up staying with them when we renew as other providers will be more competitive on price.

[Norphy]

As a MAT, we have various P2P L2 Ethernet circuits and two breakouts to the internet at different sites, all provisioned by Charterhouse Voice and Data. The circuits themselves are all 1gbps and are provided by both OpenReach and Virgin, in an attempt to have at least some carrier diversity.

 

It all works pretty well.

[DalekSec]

I have this box on my desk that does it all for me:

 

[GTX]

Exa networks dark fibre.

 

300mb both ways with 8 IP's for £300 a month. Only been "iffy" once in the last 3 years. Hopefully when it comes to contract renewal time we get more speeds. We are on a 10GB bearer though so its an easy upgrade.

[sonofsanta]

Been on Vaioni for years now, now upgraded to 1Gbps/1Gbps for, uh, £6-7kpa, forget the exact figure

 

Also worth talking to Coconnect IMO, very competitive pricing and the guy heading up the division was my Novatech account manager for years, so I'm comfortable vouching for the service even though I've not used the connection!

[Wave9_Lee]

We moved (the Wednesday before lockdown was our changeover date) to Wave 9, better service !,# support, more bandwidth (1gps fttp and a 80mbps fttc backup lins), our own onsite filtering and firewall (a sophos XG) for less than what we would have been paying the LEA for 200mbps.

 

Thx @BKGarry,

@mrhall if you'd like any pricing/info etc, then please drop me a PM or contact me any time,

 

cheers

 

Lee

[localzuk]

We have a number of PTP leased lines and an Internet leased line as well (with FTTC fail over), all from Exa.

 

We also have a couple of standard BT Business FTTC lines for 2 nurseries.

 

We then have Sophos XG that we bought extremal to Exa, with a RED device in each nursery to give a vpn back to the central site.

[synaesthesia]

Wave9 here. Couldn't recommend them highly enough - connection has been rock solid and service more importantly has been second to none.

[mrhall]

Going to look into https://www.trooli.com/ they've recently connected our town - and appear to be able to offer 1Gb for £100 per month...

[Wave9_Lee]

Going to look into https://www.trooli.com/ they've recently connected our town - and appear to be able to offer 1Gb for £100 per month...

 

As it's FttP, it's not likely to be uncontended, won't have the same SLA as a leased line and is asynchronous. That's all fine as FttP goes, but depending on the size of the school and the services you run, just double check it's what you need.

 

cheers

[Securly_Chris]

Shouldn't that be locked up safe in the tower of London?!!

 

I have this box on my desk that does it all for me:

 

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