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Internet Connections - What do you have?

Virtual_Jas
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Virtual_Jas

Virtual_Jas

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Hi guys,

 

I thought i would ask everyone what sort of Internet connection you have at your work place (Cable, Fibre, ADSL) as we are thinking of changing ours to something a little faster....

 

Our current service is abysmal at best....... We have a 4mbps ADSL line (because we are on the edge of town, and due to our distance from the local exchange) which feeds the entire network. We had our external support company in the other day to discuss possible alternatives, and according to them, our line was being hammered with a usage of 400%!

 

Do you guys know of a decent company/ISP that would provide a minimum of a 10 meg connection, fibre or otherwise, at a reasonable price?

 

The support company in question quoted us at just over £31k a year for a 10 meg fiber...... at which point, the room fell silent.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks in advance

 

Cheers guys! :)

TronXP

TronXP

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We have a leased line 8Mb on a 10Mb pipe supplied from BT, costs about £17.5k a year but installation I think was about £7.5K.

 

Can't fault it, been 100% uptime and has significantly improved the schools use of the Internet. We were in a similar posistion to you having a 2mb ADSL line as we were so far from the exchange and no cable provision.

Michael

Michael

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Posted
Our current service is abysmal at best....... We have a 4mbps ADSL line

 

To be honest speed isn't everything. Given the choice I would much prefer to have a slower more reliable connection, than a potentially faster, more expensive and unreliable connection.

 

If you checkout Sam Knows you can search for your exchange and the providers/speeds available. I would look at ADSL2 (if available), or failing this, get a second phone line installed and get broadband on that too, giving you 8Mbps in total. Much cheaper than the £31K I'm sure you'll agree. It makes absolutely no business sense at that price.

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Batman

Batman

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We have a farm of 30 old P3 laptops running Windows 98 and a program called proxy+. Each laptop has a mobile broadband connection, ten are on the Vodaphone network, ten are on O2 and we have 5 a piece on Orange and T-Mobile.

 

We have 30 different VLANs which each use one of the proxies. The advantage of having 30 different connections is that they're never likely to all fail simultaneously. With 500 clients on the network it can be a little bit slow and it's really awkward to filter. Students are not allowed to use the internet unless someone is looking over their shoulder.

 

We also have 200,000 meg leased line that we use to back up the entire internet daily to a big Amd K6-2 server farm on our colony on the moon. We don't let the kids use that but it's great for gaming out of hours.

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Virtual_Jas

Virtual_Jas

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To be honest speed isn't everything. Given the choice I would much prefer to have a slower more reliable connection, than a potentially faster, more expensive and unreliable connection.

 

If you checkout Sam Knows you can search for your exchange and the providers/speeds available. I would look at ADSL2 (if available), or failing this, get a second phone line installed and get broadband on that too, giving you 8Mbps in total. Much cheaper than the £31K I'm sure you'll agree. It makes absolutely no business sense at that price.

 

Cheers for the info Michael.

 

Sorry, i didn't make it entirely clear in my previous post. We are currently on an ADSL2+ connection for our Internet, but still get a max of 4mbps, with an upload of around 668k. We also have 2 other ADSL lines into the academy (one for VPN and the other is a 2 meg learning stream into the ULT WAN) which are also ADSL2+.

 

The engineer from the support company did suggest splitting the staff and students off on to different Internet connections, but this would involve setting up another ISA server (don't shoot me, it wasn't our choice...!) and a vast amount of tinkering about.

 

Before we became an academy, i had a dedicated 10mbps cable connection from the local council. Lord knows why ULT cut them off and stuck us with the ADSL....

Michael

Michael

Posted
Posted
Before we became an academy, i had a dedicated 10mbps cable connection from the local council. Lord knows why ULT cut them off and stuck us with the ADSL....

 

That's really strange that your school has taken a backwards step, but as I said above maybe reliability was a factor. I'd rather have a slower, reliable connection than a faster connection which regularly has problems.

I'm also surprised you're on ADSL2. I was under the impression ISPs only put customers on ADSL2 if the phone line was capable of speeds greater than 8Mbps. There isn't that much difference in the two technologies.

GrumbleDook

GrumbleDook

Posted
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Before we became an academy, i had a dedicated 10mbps cable connection from the local council. Lord knows why ULT cut them off and stuck us with the ADSL....

 

They've been pretty good round here. The one academy open has stuck with the RBC and the next one planned under ULT is also sticking with the RBC too. They are even on the upgrade program too.

User3204

User3204

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We have a 10mb fibre link into the LA / Council WAN.

 

But I have also checked with other companies, and can get a link through either Redstone or Virgin Media, both which cost about £8k pa, for the same speed. Although I do have to sign up to a 5 year contract, as otherwise there is a £7k connection fee, which I think would mean we had yet another ISDN/fibre line into our server room.

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mrstucke

mrstucke

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Newby here: Why are prices for lines quoted in the £k's of pounds range? When I search for business broadband packages there's a myriad of choices on 24Mb, unlimited connections for £50/month price range.
powdarrmonkey

powdarrmonkey

Posted
Posted
Newby here: Why are prices for lines quoted in the £k's of pounds range? When I search for business broadband packages there's a myriad of choices on 24Mb, unlimited connections for £50/month price range.

 

Because expensive lines are synchronous, meaning you send and receive at the same speed. Cheap lines, like ADSL, are asynchronous, meaning your upload speed is pathetic (the assumption is that if you're just surfing the web and so on, you're going to download a lot more than you upload, so the purposes of the limited frequencies available on a copper line are biased accordingly).

KK20

KK20

Posted
Posted (edited)

2mb SDSL line for email and vpn with a separate ADSL2 12mb/1mb for internet traffic with DG/squid.

 

Internet traffic does not touch the leased line although the DNS server does use it for external DNS resolution.

 

In the coming year I will most likely be adding another ADSL2 load balanced with the SDSL for an cheap extra 1mb upload for burst traffic.

 

SDSL has been flawless.

Edited by KK20
Shorty

Shorty

Posted
Posted

We are out in the sticks here with ADSL running at 512k. I use a service from upstream internet.

 

This allows me to bond together 2 (or more) ADSL lines giving us a 1meg down 1.4meg up speed. But this can work with any ADSL and also they now have a service that can bond other isps as well as mobile solutions.

 

So you could simply bond 2 of your 4meg lines giving you an 8 meg connection. Basically they provide a PCI adsl card for each line, I popped these into an old P4 machine as the router and then run their linux cd on the PC. Its been up and running 24/7 stop for the past two years. If you can afford it you can bond as many lines as you like.

 

Cheers

 

John

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