Which ISP/ Speed / Redundancy do you have?

[denzal2k4]

Hi everyone,

I’m currently reviewing our internet setup and wanted to get some advice. We’d ideally like to increase our speed, but since we’re already on a 1Gb bearer this would involve putting in a 10Gb line (cost?), I’m wondering if it would be better to add another 1Gb line for redundancy instead of just trying to boost bandwidth.

I’d be interested to hear what setups you’re all using and roughly how many devices/users you’re supporting. For reference, here’s our current situation:

Connection: BT, 1Gb/1Gb, £600/month no redundancy

Staff: 150

Pupils: 500

User Devices: ~350

Thanks in advance!

Edited September 17, 2025 by denzal2k4

[synaesthesia]

That's bloody expensive if that's just a connection and not including filtering or anything. However for such a small school, do you really feel the need for extra speed over and above a gig? 

Redundancy is never a bad thing; my recommendation at that level would be along the lines of looking for a cheaper connection and either doubling up for full redundancy (and of course if you need the speed then that's an easy option too) or a second, much cheaper but slower connection as backup. 4/5G mobile data, FTTC etc. As long as your termination hardware supports it all, you should be able to get both connections for roughly the same cost (depending on location of course)

[TheHyperTechie]

45 minutes ago, synaesthesia said:

That's bloody expensive if that's just a connection and not including filtering or anything. However for such a small school, do you really feel the need for extra speed over and above a gig? 

Redundancy is never a bad thing; my recommendation at that level would be along the lines of looking for a cheaper connection and either doubling up for full redundancy (and of course if you need the speed then that's an easy option too) or a second, much cheaper but slower connection as backup. 4/5G mobile data, FTTC etc. As long as your termination hardware supports it all, you should be able to get both connections for roughly the same cost (depending on location of course)

My thoughts exactly, £7200 a year just for the line! - then you add filtering on top! Do you find that 1GB is necessary? not doubting that you need it, just wondering. We are a similar size. 600 students, 100 staff, and about 400 devices. We have a 330/50 FTTP line and find that this is reasonable enough for our needs, but I have debated upping it as it can be slow at certain points in the year (i.e. Christmas when each classroom is watching a film or youtube).

[DWilson1997]

It all depends on your organisations risk appetite, for us, downtime is not an option. When looking at redundancy, you need to not only be thinking about the line into the building, but what that is connected to - we have several leased lines, with the two main lines being served by completely different ducting, backbones and exchanges - so if our local exchange is effected, at least one of our lines should not. 

 

You could consider a 2.5G connection on a 10G bearer which is what one of our lines is, it is much cheaper than the 10Gb on 10Gb bearer. 

 

 

 

[mthomas08]

Ours I believe is about £8600 a year for the full package.

 

1GB plus a backup.

Lightspeed filtering.

DNS hosting.

Telephone 3CX system.

Email spam filtering.

Firewall etc and support.

 

And damn good support, they are very quick to get back to us and make changes we need. Also get on site support within 20-30 minutes for emergencies.

 

Up time must be about 99.99% - they rarely go down.

 

We have around 1300 students 150 staff and 1000+ devices galore and tons of Cloud services.

[Rob_D]

Currently we've got 1gb/1gb main and 500mb/1gb backup. We're looking at dropping the backup to 200mb this time and definitely moving to active/active load balancing.

We're seeing around the £400-500pm mark for 1gb/1gb leased line.

 

 

[ITGuyNW]

I won't share how much we pay LCC for their internet but its eye watering. Still trying to drag us away from them...

 

We have a 900/900 line through them as our primary and a backup 1000/100 through Wave9.

 

School of 800 students and 100+ staff, 1Gb seems plenty at the moment.

[Wave9_Lee]

18 hours ago, denzal2k4 said:

Hi everyone,

I’m currently reviewing our internet setup and wanted to get some advice. We’d ideally like to increase our speed, but since we’re already on a 1Gb bearer this would involve putting in a 10Gb line (cost?), I’m wondering if it would be better to add another 1Gb line for redundancy instead of just trying to boost bandwidth.

I’d be interested to hear what setups you’re all using and roughly how many devices/users you’re supporting. For reference, here’s our current situation:

Connection: BT, 1Gb/1Gb, £600/month no redundancy

Staff: 150

Pupils: 500

User Devices: ~350

Thanks in advance!

 

Apart from the DFE standards stating that you should be having resilence, if you did a simple risk matrix for your internet service going down, it simply doesn't make sense not to have a backup connection.  If you look at the impact of the internet going down, and the option to get a backup connection for less than £1k per annum, it's a simple decision.  Clearly budgetary factors apply and you have local telecom availability to factor in but I think we come across maybe <1% of schools that couldn't get either a decent 4/5G or SOGEA connection.  

 

Where is your firewall/filtering provided?  If separate from your ISP (i.e. agent based or local appliances/firewalls) then you have a few options.  If provided by your ISP (i.e. hosted by them) then you may have slightly less.

 

Others have asked what the £600 includes, but if it's just internet, then if you are anywhere near the end of your current term, you should be looking to replace that, add resilence and still save money.

 

In fact, unless you are particularly rural, or in an anomolous area, you should be able to get a 10Gbps connection for around what you're currently paying.

 

Due to the increased prevalence of alt-nets (ITS, Cityfibre, etc) this list is not exhaustive.  Resilience options in descending bandwidth and cost order:

 

2 x leased lines RO2 - guaranteed diverse delivery, different ducts, different exchanges, same ISP, so physical diversity but not L3 £££££  99.999%

2 x leased lines - 2 providers (i.e. 1 x openreach + 1 x VMB/alt-net) different fibres, different ducts, different ISP (if not hosted fw/filter) L2 and L3 diversity ££££

2 x leased line - 2 openreach providers (ie not alt-net available), different exchanges, same duct for part of the last mile, different ISP, part L2 diversity, L3 diversity ££££

1 x leased line + FttP/SOGEA/5G - mostly different infrastructure, different ISP L2 and L3 diverse £££

2 x FttP ideally different ISP, shared fibre/duct and exchange ££

FttP + 5G  (SOGEA is not available where FttP is enabled) ££

 

There are various tunes that can be played (i.e. starlink, alt-nets)

Leased Line and FttP are available with a 6 hour fix target SLA, although leased line is typically more 'robust'.  In reality they both hardly ever fail.  5G doesn't have an SLA.  

 

You can see that the top section is mostly large secondary schools, perhaps hosting core services for a Trust, healthy budget.  I  think the last 3 options are the most commonly deployed.  

 

Worth mentioning that if you have your firewall and/or filtering hosted by the same provider as the connectivity, you should satisfy yourself that the hosted service is itself diverse, resilient, especially if you have multiple Trust schools on the same service. 

Edited September 18, 2025 by Wave9_Lee

[denzal2k4]

Lots of interesting feedback, thanks, yes this is purely a 1Gb internet line, we have onsite Smoothwall, @mthomas08 be interested to hear what products you have for that price. 

 

We don't necessarily NEED more than 1Gb now but if we are entering a 3 year deal it may be worth future proofing, we are fully Sharepoint for file storage, iSAMS is cloud, we have cloud backups, so it does get pushed at times.

 

Does anyone know how much of ballache it is to get things like 3cx to switch over seamlessly via Smoothwall in event of an outage on the main line? Assuming the secondary line has different IP addresses.

 

Thanks for the thorough post Lee, we may be in touch soon.

Edited September 18, 2025 by denzal2k4

[mthomas08]

26 minutes ago, denzal2k4 said:

Lots of interesting feedback, thanks, yes this is purely a 1Gb internet line, we have onsite Smoothwall, @mthomas08 be interested to hear what products you have for that price. 

 

Message sent. Don't think we're alowed to openly say company X is good. I think I got a slight slapped wrist some years ago.

[Aprice]

My experience with secondaries is that 1GB is generally more than sufficient. Are you sure it's the WAN connection that's the bottleneck and not the filtering?

 

[dmj]

10GB/s "business" fibre (NOT a leased line) is around £4k per year, or £1500 for 1GB/s 

https://communityfibre.co.uk/business

 

[Wave9_Lee]

3 hours ago, dmj said:

10GB/s "business" fibre (NOT a leased line) is around £4k per year, or £1500 for 1GB/s 

https://communityfibre.co.uk/business

 

In London

 

 

There are dozens of Alt-nets now, largely funded by your pension money and PE finance, many with flawed business models and questionable viability.  Many will go bust, many will be gobbled up.  We deal with several of the ones we believe offer a good service and have a sustainable business model (or have a network that will be valuable to someone if the worst happens)  I'd guess there's less than 20 that will survive in some form or other.  Check your SLA, contention, security, and make sure you know how they will connect to your premises - if it's their own fibre, then this will involve civils and disruption.  Concern I have in London is that it's probably the worst location in the UK to plan/schedule civils, road closures and traffic management (and wayleaves).  They have their place and they are having a good impact on bringing/keeping prices down through competition.  As per the subject of this thread, route diversity can be an issue.

 

Community Fibre seem to have a decent offer - they now provide backup for LGFL network in london I believe.   But I'm not sure how building more connectivity in London where the streets are paved with fibre will be sustainable in the long-term.

Edited September 18, 2025 by Wave9_Lee

[MatthewL]

I've run orginisations of serveral thousand using a 1GB connection and its never peaked, we had a leased line and then a normal FTTP connection and it worked a treat.