Leased Line

[steve_nfi]

Has anybody got a leased line to their school?

I've been asked to look into this and find out the cost. Got to admit I don't know much about them.

Do you have to use BT, your ISP, the people hosting your managed web security or what?

 

What do I need to be looking for?

 

Is there an alternative?

 

Is this the same a a fibre line?

 

Any help greatly appreciated.

[GrumbleDook]

Becta have an accredited ISP page somewhere ... the link escapes me right now.

 

Other options include having a business line (BT and Virgin both have these) and then provide your own filtering (another cost to add on ... but don't forget to add on the cost of your time to set things up etc).

[FN-GM]

We have a fiber connection to ZEN (just over the road from us). We pay for that £30,000 a year that is a 100meg connection with 256 public ip addresses.

[Edu-IT]

We have a fiber connection to ZEN (just over the road from us). We pay for that £30,000 a year that is a 100meg connection with 256 public ip addresses.

How could you use all those, in a school?

[FN-GM]

We dont we use around 20 odd of them

[dhicks]

Is there an alternative?

 

I got an interesting ad in the post today about a company that specialises in educational institutions and provides "uncontested" ADSL connections. I have the ad on my desk at work, I'll try and remember to find it tomorrow.

 

--

David Hicks

[Sylv3r]

How could you use all those, in a school?

 

I am sure if we had them available we could use a good chunk of them. We have some many ports open on our allocated one IP, I think it would be much easier to manage if each external service we provided had its own dedicated IP address.

 

We are also looking at getting a business ADSL line installed for staff use in the staff work area - for external access to Youtube and the like. I'll keep an eye on this thread for more answers.

[dhicks]

I got an interesting ad in the post today about a company that specialises in educational institutions and provides "uncontested" ADSL connections.

 

Ah, here we are: Exa Networks. Seem like a sensible sort of bunch, might be worth a try.

 

--

David Hicks

[Joss]

Costs around £14K pa - dependant on number of computers look at BLOXX filtering solution

[Netfiend]

Has anybody got a leased line to their school?

I've been asked to look into this and find out the cost. Got to admit I don't know much about them.

Do you have to use BT, your ISP, the people hosting your managed web security or what?

 

What do I need to be looking for?

 

Is there an alternative?

 

Is this the same a a fibre line?

 

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

Interesting questions here. Firstly, there are a number of alternatives do Leased lines. They provide a similar service, but maybe are not as resolute as a leased line. These can include copper leased lines (SDSL) or even fully bonded solutions incorporating more than one circuit, to obtain a large amount of bandwidth.

 

Leased lines can be either fibre or copper. However if you are looking for more than 2Mb, then you will be looking at a fibre line. There are three main types. Either a 10Mb line, an 100Mb line or a 1Gb line. You would usually ask for this to be installed, then work out with your ISP (whether that be BT, NTL, Fluidata or ZEN) on the amount of bandwidth you are most likely to use. Eg. you may want a 100Mb line, but only want to use 10Mb of that, meaning that you only pay for the 10Mb.

 

However, they can be quite troublesome. As well as being extremely expensive if you are out of a city, they can take up to 60days to install and are frought with excess charges. However, if they work, they work VERY well.

For quick info, have a look at Fluidata Ltd | Leased Line | Legacy Internet Connectivity | Low Contention