Talk to me about Broadband and Filtering!

[Zammo]

Hello all

 

What is everyone using for broadband and filtering solutions these days?

 

We are evaluating our options for our MAT and want to know what people would suggest. Ideal would be:

 

- Leased line (obvs) with backup connection

- 5G bakup connection *option* would be a huge plus

- Co-Managed firewall

- Cloud based filtering, bonus points if it has iOS and ChromeOS agents for students taking devices home

[Aprice]

For our main site, 1G leased line with a FTTP Backup connection

Smoothwall S10 providing filtering & firewall

 

Other sites we tend to use a Mikrotik upstream of the Smoothwall which provides the firewall.

[CHiLL]

We have 2x leased lines using different backbones. 1x Virgin 1Gb FTTP and 1x OpenReach 1Gb FTTP based solutions, configured for load-balancing.

Sophos XG for firewall and on-site filtering, which has HTTPS filtering (requiring deployment of certificates to clients).

For off-site safeguarding, we use Smoothwall Monitor (formerly Visigo), which takes captures and sends it off for human analysis, which are then forwarded to DSL if severe enough. Very severe ones also get a phone call.

We also have a basic/cheap subscription with Senso.Cloud, which allows us to install a remote client on machines and block categories such as games, videos, etc. However, because we don't have the full package, we cannot granularly filter it...so blocking the videos category also blocks legitimate learning video sites like BBC Bitesize, MathsWatch, etc.

 

I've consulted at another school, which is part of a MAC and they have some server space in a local data centre. They have their Sophos XG located in the data centre and the Internet for all the schools routes through that centre, so the filtering is all in-line.

Edited July 14, 2023 by CHiLL

[RLR]

Hello all

 

What is everyone using for broadband and filtering solutions these days?

 

We are evaluating our options for our MAT and want to know what people would suggest. Ideal would be:

 

- Leased line (obvs) with backup connection

- 5G bakup connection *option* would be a huge plus

- Co-Managed firewall

- Cloud based filtering, bonus points if it has iOS and ChromeOS agents for students taking devices home

 

We just upgraded to a 10G line and our backup is 1G. We have a co-managed Fortinet firewall.

 

Our students are 1:1 with iPads and we push out a pac file that redirects their traffic to our firewall so all their traffic off the network still goes through our Fortinet filtering. As far as I'm aware, offsite filtering for iOS is difficult to achieve with some sort of agent as it usually requires the devices to use a bespoked browser. This is a restriction on Apples side unless it has changed in the last couple of years.

[SchoolsBroadband]

Hi @Zammo,

 

we find its split as follows

 

Primary Schools

FTTP (if available) or Leased Line with 4G / 5G or FTTC backup

 

Secondary Schools

Leased line with FTTP or FTTC backup and dual router.

 

99% of the +2,000 schools that use our service take our co-managed and hosted FortiGate virtual firewall and for filtering either Fortinet or Netsweeper hosted. Both filtering products have their advantage with Netsweeper being more cost effective for off-net filtering in particular via their N-Client rather than Fortinets Forticlient (although this has other advantages such as endpoint protection as its not just a filter client)

 

We're now seeing about 50% of secondary schools taking a 10Gbps bearer rather than a 1Gbps bearer.

 

The added advantage of having the FortiGate in the cloud is that we can create and include a WAN as standard between all of your MATs sites, so a single pane of glass for all security. Likewise its the same for Netsweeper. So no big hardware capex costs and as the boxes are huge (we use the carrier versions) you can put a lot of throughput through them without having to upgrade in the future.

 

We look after some of the largest MATs in the UK and you can procure via direct award on certain frameworks or a mini-competition with our competitors.

 

If you'd like to be put in contact with some of our customers I'll happily pass you on their details.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[Wave9_Lee]

Hello all

 

What is everyone using for broadband and filtering solutions these days?

 

We are evaluating our options for our MAT and want to know what people would suggest. Ideal would be:

 

- Leased line (obvs) with backup connection

- 5G bakup connection *option* would be a huge plus

- Co-Managed firewall

- Cloud based filtering, bonus points if it has iOS and ChromeOS agents for students taking devices home

We prefer the SDWAN approach with direct internet access and on-premise co-managed firewall/filter. In our view this gives much more flexibility, security and visibility. Resilience is improved by taking 2 connections from alternate ISPs/technologies inc 5G where available. One thing to consider is if all of your schools are connected to the same core infrastructure and there's an issue, you have the risk of all schools going down at the same time, as happened with empsn last year.

 

Happy to discuss pros and cons any time.