Schools Broadband Internet Issues

[Jawloms]

@JDawgg - LGfL are brilliant. We moved there in September and they've been brilliant.

 

If you terminate with SBB, even at the end of your minimum contract, they charge you £100 for the privilege of leaving them......

[JDawgg]

2 minutes ago, Jawloms said:

@JDawgg - LGfL are brilliant. We moved there in September and they've been brilliant.

 

If you terminate with SBB, even at the end of your minimum contract, they charge you £100 for the privilege of leaving them......

 

Thanks - will bare this in mind. 

[Frodo_Baggins]

All good with our schools so far this morning, to be fair to them the comms have been better with this incident and have had meaningful replies. Thanks SBB for sorting this, our users are happy this morning and so am I 🙂

[ITNERD]

Slight issues with sluggish browsing this morning, but not completely down at least

[JazzFlute]

Gotta say been fine at my school well apart from when i just restarted a switch accidentally and knocked half the school offline for 2 minutes🤣

[ITNERD]

13 minutes ago, JazzFlute said:

Gotta say been fine at my school well apart from when i just restarted a switch accidentally and knocked half the school offline for 2 minutes🤣

 

Blame them anyway haha

[JazzFlute]

28 minutes ago, ITNERD said:

 

Blame them anyway haha

 

I always fess up and blame a power surge 🤷🏻‍♂️🤣

[365Steve]

On 17/04/2026 at 12:47, ultraspy2000 said:

Thanks and I’m thinking along exactly the same lines.

We’ve looked at moving away in the past (including to LGFL), but always hit the same block, the amount of reconfiguration involved, rebuilding whitelists, and essentially starting from scratch again.

I guess tt’s that balance between short-term pain and long-term gain, but situations like this definitely make the decision feel more urgent.
 

Would be really useful to hear from anyone who’s recently moved away from SBB to another provider and understand how did it go in practice? What was involved overall in terms of new equipment, systems, and configuration, etc...? Was the transition as painful as it seems on paper, or manageable?

 

I've moved a few schools from SBB to Exa (as an Exa partner). Migrating is probably not as painful as you may imagine 

Take a copy of your whitelists and firewall rules then we can replicate them,  but we'd also use it as a chance to check you're as secure as can be.

Equipment going in is dependant on what you've got already. If you've got Virgin or Openreach fibre in place and the right termination equipment, then it's possibly just a change of router (which we'd configure for you in advance) and away you go.  None of the schools we switched had any downtime at all. 

Feel free to drop me a dm if you've any specific queries. 

[Jawloms]

We were with SBB and moved to LGfL. We had to re-IP virtually our entire network, but the support from LGfL with both moving to them, getting things set up, and then their on-going support is so good that we definitely consider it worth the effort. We get tickets closed within minutes, or at worst a few hours, rather than days. They also get it right the first time rather than having to go back and forth a number of times. For example, with SBB on one occasion we needed to access an AWS site which was blocked to upload some data. We logged a ticket and they whitelisted Amazon video.

[nicholab]

Could you not do one-to-one NAT on your firewall?

[sigma]

4 hours ago, Jawloms said:

We were with SBB and moved to LGfL. We had to re-IP virtually our entire network, but the support from LGfL with both moving to them, getting things set up, and then their on-going support is so good that we definitely consider it worth the effort. We get tickets closed within minutes, or at worst a few hours, rather than days. They also get it right the first time rather than having to go back and forth a number of times. For example, with SBB on one occasion we needed to access an AWS site which was blocked to upload some data. We logged a ticket and they whitelisted Amazon video.

 

I presume you mean completed and closed rather than the SBB way of closing them regardless. 🙂 

 

I've opened tickets for LGfl out of hours - for the next day and had them completed during the same evening!

 

With SBB when I raised ticket regarding a Safeguarding inccident, it took a week for them to even open it.   

 

I mentioned the incident here:

https://www.edugeek.net/forums/topic/220469-nudify-apps-unexpectedly-not-blocked/#comment-1979081

 

Even though we were not a customer at the time, LGfl reached out and had this resolved directly with Netsweeper "within the day".   (Thankfully)

 

 

[PaddyNewman]

8 hours ago, nicholab said:

Could you not do one-to-one NAT on your firewall?

As a quick bodge, yes. It would be horrible longer term and just adds another method of failures happening. 

 

Another hop to potentially ruin your day!

[synaesthesia]

Anyone having issues today?

Neither of their websites work.

 

[ITNERD]

4 minutes ago, synaesthesia said:

Anyone having issues today?

Neither of their websites work.

 

Around 9am this morning, called the helpdesk and they said it was a Virgin NNI bandwidth issue, told me it might settle in an hour, thankfully it did.

[JazzFlute]

33 minutes ago, synaesthesia said:

Anyone having issues today?

Neither of their websites work.

 

Not me, been ok and stable since the major problems a few weeks back but below is the latest update on their status page but touch wood its not affecting me.

 

System Status Update

Virgin: Status changed to Advisory

Author: Euan Davies 2026-05-12 12:04:12

Traffic levels are now beginning to stabilise on the affected NNI following the earlier period of elevated utilisation.

Monitoring will continue to ensure service performance returns to and remains at normal operating levels. Thank you for your continued patience.

Author: Euan Davies 2026-05-12 12:04:12

System Status Update

Virgin: Status changed to Service Degraded

Author: Euan Davies 2026-05-12 09:03:50

We are aware that the NNI has again reached maximum capacity, which may result in degraded performance and reduced speeds for users.

Work is currently underway to migrate sites away from the affected NNI in order to reduce utilisation and restore normal service levels.

Thank you for your continued patience while this work is carried out.

Author: Euan Davies 2026-05-12 09:03:50

[synaesthesia]

Seems to be a fair bit of leaning on it being a Virgin issue when no other sites on Virgin backbones are struggling. Wonder if it's therefore specifically the NNI Virgin put in place linking their infrastructure to Talk Straights and also assume therefore that TS customers not on Virgin backbones are unaffected.