Schools Broadband - feedback please

[speakercon]

We're currently looking at changing our ISP and have proposals from a few providers including Schools Broadband. On paper their proposal looks very appealing what with the hosted firewall and netsweeper filtering.

 

I've already read through numerous threads on here about issues with the service a few years ago but I was hoping to get some recent feedback from current customers in terms of reliability of the services.

 

Thanks

[caffrey]

On paper it does,

Personally for me it went downhill from day 1, but ymmv

The broadband is solid but that's because they are a virgin reseller. I've not had a working backup line from day one as they can't support the way we have our network setup even though my network was explained fully before installation. The configuration wasn't taken into account when we went to swap over either so installation had to be delayed - took months to sort out.

 

Netsweeper works but I can't say it's great, just never seems to have worked right for us e.g. keyword overblocking. The reporting is terrible .

 

Support has never been a strong point either, a lot of blame was usually put on me which usually wasn't the case and maybe because of Covid it's been super slow

 

But like I said YMMV, I might just be an outlier but this is my experience and I'm looking to move elsewhere once this contract is done.

[ticktock]

We are not with Schools Broadband but our LA implemented Netsweeper 18 months ago and it hasn't been good. I totally agree with @caffrey's comments above. We had lightspeed before and imho it was a heck of a lot better.

[Edu-IT]

Support has never been a strong point either, a lot of blame was usually put on me which usually wasn't the case and maybe because of Covid it's been super slow

To give them some credit, their new support portal 'The Hub' is a vast improvement on anything they've had in the past 5 years plus so it seems some things are heading in the right direction.

[caffrey]

To give them some credit, their new support portal 'The Hub' is a vast improvement on anything they've had in the past 5 years plus so it seems some things are heading in the right direction.

 

True, well apart when it was being setup and I got spammed to death - still doesn't help the speed though.

[SchoolsBroadband]

@caffrey we're just about to do some changes regarding over blocking. I need to check with the NOC guys but I think we're doing a beta of this imminently so if you'd like to be part of it and give us some feedback do let us know.

 

We've also got a brand new reporting engine we've developed internally which although the current reporting engine is in our opinion fit for purpose the new one is a big improvement and is also fast as grease lightning

 

We've spent a lot of time developing the hub and this is going to be the central repository and interaction point for all of our products in the future. It will take us time to bring them in so you've a single pane of glass effectively but we're well on our way.

 

We've a lot of new stuff coming in the next 12 months which is thanks to the small army of developers we've employed and major network upgrades.

 

Watch out for some excellent pricing / FOC on 10Gbps co-location into your WAN very soon for MATs to help drive private cloud adoption which a lot of our big MATs already do.

 

All of our core hosted services have been solid as a rock for the past 14 months or so.

 

Thanks for considering us @speakercon

 

Dave

[Wubbalubbadub]

I have used schools Broadband for some time now.

 

It has definitely had its peaks and throths. More positive than negative.

 

In terms of the solution as a whole. It's fantastic.... Hosted firewall and netsweeper. It works really well.

 

The support is a bit hit and miss. It started off amazing... Like really amazing.. then when lightspeed took a turn, as did the support and the offering was somewhat non existent.

 

When netsweeper came about, the support went back up again, but then it seems to be a bit hit and miss these days.

 

The teams seem to swap around every few months, with a wave of new job titles to go with it. I think some of the team I've dealt with have had 3 different job titles in the last 3 years, but doing the same work.

Which is where I feel the support is hit and miss, most recently the hub has been released which is actually really good. But other changes, not so good. They seem to have a new overflow team to deal with calls when it's busy, which I'm guessing is now outsourced, and they are just diabolically bad. They didn't even know what I meant when I said firewall.

 

To me, when a company starts to outsource, I start to worry, as it appears like their eye has moved from the support they provide to saving money. So a minor red flag there.

 

NOC team is still where tickets go to die, Probably by biggest gripe with schools Broadband, they are an unreachable team, and I find most my issues are "with the NOC team", which is why I get frustrated there.

But I guess they are meant to be sorting the issues and not dealing with us mortals on the phones.

 

Response times on tickets are higher than usual these days, but I know this is the busy period for new orders for them. We deal with other providers, and I'd say that schools Broadband still out perform them.

 

That's my honest thoughts, overall, I would recommend.

Edited May 16, 2021 by Wubbalubbadub

[Wubbalubbadub]

I have used schools Broadband for some time now.

 

It has definitely had its peaks and throths. More positive than negative.

 

In terms of the solution as a whole. It's fantastic.... Hosted firewall and netsweeper. It works really well.

 

The support is a bit hit and miss. It started off amazing... Like really amazing.. then when lightspeed took a turn, as did the support and the offering was somewhat non existent.

 

When netsweeper came about, the support went back up again, but then it seems to be a bit hit and miss these days.

 

The teams seem to swap around every few months, with a wave of new job titles to go with it. I think some of the team I've dealt with have had 3 different job titles in the last 3 years, but doing the same work.

Which is where I feel the support is hit and miss, most recently the hub has been released which is actually really good. But other changes, not so good. They seem to have a new overflow team to deal with calls when it's busy, which I'm guessing is now outsourced, and they are just diabolically bad. They didn't even know what I meant when I said firewall.

 

To me, when a company starts to outsource, I start to worry, as it appears like their eye has moved from the support they provide to saving money. So a minor red flag there.

 

NOC team is still where tickets go to die, Probably by biggest gripe with schools Broadband, they are an unreachable team, and I find most my issues are "with the NOC team", which is why I get frustrated there.

But I guess they are meant to be sorting the issues and not dealing with us mortals on the phones.

 

Response times on tickets are higher than usual these days, but I know this is the busy period for new orders for them. We deal with other providers, and I'd say that schools Broadband still out perform them.

 

That's my honest thoughts, overall, I would recommend.

 

Just an update to everyone on this one.... I have a feeling that the entire 1st line support team has been outsourced. I can no longer get through to anyone i recognise, unless I select service delivery. The team I get on support have no technical ability, and just take my details and end up logging a ticket on my behalf.

 

So i take it back, start looking elsewhere!

[speakercon]

Thank you everyone for your feedback.

 

I'm just thinking in terms of logging support requests would you say these are mostly to fix faults or are they configuration changes?

 

I can imagine the setup with the hosted firewall and filtering needs more intervention but at the moment the only reason I would need to get in contact with our current provider would be to report and outage which basically never happens (touch wood).

[paulkerton]

Connectivity is fine. The big problem is Netsweeper. It's been truly awful for us. Really wish they hadn't gone that route. Reporting is terrible, and we have to go through several other systems in an attempt to find out who has been looking at things they shouldn't.

If you're on Windows I'm sure it might work fine, but if you use any other platform you may be better looking for alternative filtering.

[Jawloms]

We use them and have been very happy. I don't remember having any downtime ever. Speed is good. We don't interact with Netsweeper a great deal as it seems pretty good at blocking the right things for us so it's not often we have to block/whitelist something, but we use Impero too so look through the logs of that to view people's browsing.

[SchoolsBroadband]

Hi guys,

 

we do support multiple OS's so I've sent @paulkerton a message to discuss so we can get to the bottom of his issues.

 

We have a new reporting engine which will be released this year which is super fast and completely bespoke to us. No other Netsweeper provider will have it as we've developed it internally. It will be a big improvement over the current one.

@speakercon the amount of calls you make regarding connectivity should be minimal unless there is a mass outage for some reason in which case we proactively email our customers and put a phone message on if that ever happens. The amount of calls about filtering is dependent on your skill and your ability to learn how to use Netsweeper (as with anything you get out what you put in). It's also dependent on your default setup. Some customers like it more restrictive than others. The more restrictive it is the more blocking will occur which if you're not up to speed with how to unblock and diagnose can mean excess calls to the help desk.

 

We'll be doing some more free training on Fortigate and Netsweeper which we do a few times a year. We often invite customers into our office but due to the pandemic we'll probably do this over Teams or Zoom.

 

Thanks for considering us.

 

Dave

[SchoolsBroadband]

Just an update to everyone on this one.... I have a feeling that the entire 1st line support team has been outsourced. I can no longer get through to anyone i recognise, unless I select service delivery. The team I get on support have no technical ability, and just take my details and end up logging a ticket on my behalf.

 

So i take it back, start looking elsewhere!

 

That's not the case. We are trialling outsourced support for connectivity faults only as they are pretty generic issues to any ISP and those engineers don't need to have the additional skillsets ours do. All firewall, filtering, VoIP and other services continue to be handled by our normal team.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[JCB]

We use them and have been very happy. I don't remember having any downtime ever. Speed is good. We don't interact with Netsweeper a great deal as it seems pretty good at blocking the right things for us so it's not often we have to block/whitelist something, but we use Impero too so look through the logs of that to view people's browsing.

 

I'm late to the party here, but wanted to chip in and agree with Jawloms here...

 

I'm very happy with the Schools Broadband service we have here. From my experience, initial installation and customer mgmt, support availability and response on the phone, filtering and security, planned (and inevitably a couple of unplanned!) outage comms, and our recent line upgrades have all been top-notch. Been with them >7 years and they are way better than the provider we had previously, and I know neighbouring schools also using them agree. Contrary to some of the posts above, I find the Netsweeper solution far better than the previous Lightspeed system which I hated - it's actually possible for me to get meaningful reports out of there (though we are pure Windows environment which may help) and the filtering is very hands-off and well adjusted for pupil/staff use so to be honest it doesn't need a lot of interaction.

 

Yes I've had a few tech reports 'go to the NOC team' too but in my experience that results in the issue getting fixed. I've never had issues with the first point of contact when I've phoned, and on the rare occasions I've called regarding an outage I've not needed to be transferred to someone in a higher tier - if it's an issue that affects more than my specific school all I want is a ticket logged and a phone call later to let me know it's all sorted (which is the service I have received).

[BrotherSidious]

Coming to the end of our 5 year contract. Won't be renewing and based on our experience I can't recommend. Others may have a different experience and some comments above suggest a good experience but that's not me. My Personal experience/opinion :

 

I wanted to move away from Netsweeper which is why I went to Schools Broadband as they were using Lightspeed. Got moved back to Netsweeper with no consultation or choice. Personally feel Netsweeper is inferior to Lightspeed.

 

Wasn't told that if we were on a shared resource with another school those schools cannot use the same IP addresses, even if private, so had to re-address our entire site and reconfigure all our internal switches and routers which wasn't a 5 minute job.

 

Several other issues and found support lacking. Poor to no communication. On two occasions we were wrongly identified as a different school and changes made which broke them and us. On one call I sent a screenshot with our school identifier on it to argue my point and they still changed the wrong school after assurances from the previous incident that it wouldn't happen again.

 

Hidden shared lists updated with no notice to open up sites for other schools as a lot of them wanted to access certain sites and they couldn't be bothered to unblock at each individual school. This opened up sites which were previously blocked for us and allowed student access. Happened more than once.

 

There is more but felt this is enough to justify to the OP my reasoning.

 

On a plus point, there are always improvements and enhancements coming.

[paulkerton]

I wanted to move away from Netsweeper which is why I went to Schools Broadband as they were using Lightspeed.

 

This was my single biggest annoyance. Netsweeper was like being shackled, then releasing them with Lightspeed - and as soon as we ran away from the shackles we ended up being clamped in other pair. It's a truly inferior product, for me. Really grated me that (at the time I'm not responsible for this now due to a different job) we'd finally signed up to a solution I was happy with, to find we were back to square one.

 

Especially as we weren't Windows only, and it really only worked in Windows environments (and still to this day, isn't great with anything other than Windows)

[PrimaryNetMan]

Made the move away from SB 18 months ago and can echo the comments of BrotherSidious above. Avoid if you can.

[sigma]

‘My experience of SB had been good. I still tear my hair out at tiny primary schools that use a County service that can best be described as cranky.

[Sonic007]

We have just moved to Schools Broadband and are very pleased so far.

 

Speed is great.

 

Like moving from any provider there are always a few things to tweak and their support department have been excellent, unlike our old provider which would take nearly a week to action any tickets. Logged an issue this morning and it was sorted moments later. Happy.

 

Ours also came with backup 4G router which takes over if fibre connection goes down.

Edited July 19, 2021 by Sonic007

[speakercon]

Thanks everyone for adding your thoughts. Has anyone else had BrotherSidious' experience of having to change their internal IP ranges? Kind of reminds me of being with the LA!

[SchoolsBroadband]

Thanks everyone for adding your thoughts. Has anyone else had BrotherSidious' experience of having to change their internal IP ranges? Kind of reminds me of being with the LA!

 

Hi @speakercon,

 

that shouldn't be the case as we have the facility to use overlapping IP's specifically to avoid this which is something Netsweeper actually built specifically for us. I can't comment as to why @BrotherSidious had to do this without further looking into it.

 

@speakercon if you want to send me over your internal IP's in a PM i'll confirm with the build team if it would be a problem (which I highly doubt). That said if you use 127.0.0.x then it could be an issue

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[BrotherSidious]

@SchoolsBroadband The IP addressing issue occurred when we first joined Schools Broadband and at the time you were using Lightspeed and I believe it was an issue with the Rocket, this was something we were not advised about. As you say, it may no longer be an issue with NetSweeper but it was an issue for us.

 

While you're on here Dave, we put in a request a week ago with regards to moving our DNS and are still no further forward with it. Any chance you could have a look at what the delay is please? If you need a ticket reference its : 422123 and dates back to June when we made an initial request to clarify where our DNS was hosted.

Edited July 29, 2021 by BrotherSidious

[sippo]

The move from lightspeed to netsweeper did it for us. That's when it went wrong.

 

Always excuses, and never took responsibility. Shocking support, never got an answer. Never got any refunds for downtime despite claiming.

 

Before the move, we were a customer for 7 years. Then 3 after that. One of the first 'down south'. Gave them many a reference with never getting any thanks from SBB.

[SchoolsBroadband]

The move from lightspeed to netsweeper did it for us. That's when it went wrong.

 

Always excuses, and never took responsibility. Shocking support, never got an answer. Never got any refunds for downtime despite claiming.

 

Before the move, we were a customer for 7 years. Then 3 after that. One of the first 'down south'. Gave them many a reference with never getting any thanks from SBB.

 

 

I'm sorry to hear that sippo. If you are due any service credits they will be paid. Please send me a pm

 

 

Also an official thank you for being a previous reference site too.

 

We've invested a lot in our support over the past 2 years and on the whole things have improved although there's always work to do

We've had a new supportanager for the past year that has changed the way we do a lot of things

Our current customer satisfaction scores for the past few months is averaging 9/10 too although I am realistic and there are always some things we can do better.

 

Do send me a pm @sippo as it would be good to chat once I'm back off my holiday next week.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[SchoolsBroadband]

@SchoolsBroadband The IP addressing issue occurred when we first joined Schools Broadband and at the time you were using Lightspeed and I believe it was an issue with the Rocket, this was something we were not advised about. As you say, it may no longer be an issue with NetSweeper but it was an issue for us.

 

While you're on here Dave, we put in a request a week ago with regards to moving our DNS and are still no further forward with it. Any chance you could have a look at what the delay is please? If you need a ticket reference its : 422123 and dates back to June when we made an initial request to clarify where our DNS was hosted.

 

 

Yes our old Lightspeed clusters couldn't have two customers with the same ip address on them. One of the reasons we moved to Netsweeper as that can and was written specifically for us.

 

@BrotherSidious do send me a pm with the case reference and I'll escalate for you if need be.

 

There's also the escalation contacts in the service manual you should have too.

 

Thanks

 

Dave