Internet providers - Going it alone

[SimpleSi]

have just got a 2yr deal with them to upgrade to fibre on 40/6Mbit ADSL for £45+VAT per month. We only have one ICT room with 20 PC's (plus admin staff) so it should be enough.

We have a Cisco firewall in place and currently using Websense filtering so that's already sorted.

 

I wish we could all do that

 

Don't get me wrong - I've a socialist heart at times so I wouldn't want some remote rural school losing out but a lot of savings could be made by surburban/city schools getting direct cable/fibre feeds on commercial rates from BT/Virgin/etc without the RBC overheads but with the LEA giving more subsidies to remote schools.

 

VPNs would take care of any security issues/connecting to the over-vaunted NEN!

 

Simon

 

Simon

[sonofsanta]

We are tied into a county arrangement (Oxfordshire) paying £2600/year for a 2mbit SDSL link. This does not include filtering, we have to either pay the county extra to use theirs, or provide our own (but it has to be BECTA-compliant...)

 

Does anyone else think this is excessive? We only have 200 pupils, so a maximum of about 20 people using the connection at the same time. I reckon straightforward ADSL would be faster!

 

Seems a lot for 2mb, but I think the key is the Synchronous bit - if you don't have any on-site servers for people to access remotely (webmail, VLE etc.) then you probably don't need all that much upspeed and ADSL would be fine. Particularly ADSL2+, you can get some very competitive prices. Don't know what rates Smoothwall would come out at for you (for example) but even if you don't save much money, with ADSL2+ & a Smoothie you'd likely have a much faster & more flexible solution than whatever you get now for you £2.6k.

 

My tuppence anyway!

[Achandler]

Primary Schools around here pay about £5000 a year for 10meg line with filtering and anti-virus, about £3800 for just the line.

[Jonny]

State school here, but we disagreed with county some time ago and moved away.

We use 2 adsl lines with isa 2010 load balancing between them, and smoothwall providing the filtering.

We have had to clamp down on youtube, radio stations etc but it didn't take staff long to settle down.

 

Contrary to what most counties imply you are not required to use their solutions or filtering, it is solely the choice of the headteacher.

[mats]

We give embc around £12500 pa for 10mb over fibre. There's a briefing on the 19th to discuss our options beyond the end of the contract. Struggling to justify their cost atm - urban primary, 200 kids.

 

We also have embc hosted mail. I suspect that moving email to another provider will be a royal PITA.

[glennda]

for that much you can easily get a leased line and filtering - I've just signed up to Global AXS on 100MB over fiber for that price.

 

For 10MB on 100mb bearer you are looking at about 8k from them for the line leaving 4.5k for smoothie (or other filtering) which means you are quids in - it then slowly increments up. I personally @mats would be looking away as that seems stupidly high.

[CyberNerd]

We give embc around £12500 pa for 10mb over fibre. There's a briefing on the 19th to discuss our options beyond the end of the contract. Struggling to justify their cost atm - urban primary, 200 kids.

 

We also have embc hosted mail. I suspect that moving email to another provider will be a royal PITA.

 

ouch. £8400 for 30Mb on a 100Mb/s bearer here. (Vaioni)

You could probably get an 10 Mb/s EFM circuit for about £4k!!!

 

Hosted mail is easy to move, just get a google domain for free.

[mats]

ouch. £8400 for 30Mb on a 100Mb/s bearer here. (Vaioni)

You could probably get an 10 Mb/s EFM circuit for about £4k!!!

 

Hosted mail is easy to move, just get a google domain for free.

 

Interesting. Setup / install costs for your connection?

 

gmail. I use it for personal mail (and it's great) but it's a leap changing the school over..

[CyberNerd]

Interesting. Setup / install costs for your connection?

 

gmail. I use it for personal mail (and it's great) but it's a leap changing the school over..

 

£2500 setup - If you need fibre installed then you'll need to pay around £4000 for an 'excess construction charge' . Vaioni have recently been promoting 35Mb/s EFM though, so this would be worth looking into.

[sonofsanta]

We're on Vaioni here as well, have been for a year, 20mb on 100mb bearer, and it does the job very well and at a very good price. Think ours worked out at £25k total over a three year commitment, set up & running costs etc.

 

Only issue to bear in mind is that not every ISP can act as DNS for a .sch.uk address. Our DNS records are still hosted by RM as a result, not that it's much hassle.

[jamesfed]

We are tied into a county arrangement (Oxfordshire) paying £2600/year for a 2mbit SDSL link. This does not include filtering, we have to either pay the county extra to use theirs, or provide our own (but it has to be BECTA-compliant...)

 

Does anyone else think this is excessive? We only have 200 pupils, so a maximum of about 20 people using the connection at the same time. I reckon straightforward ADSL would be faster!

 

OCC are updating their lines for Primarys soon enough with a comercial system - should be on the way by 2014 (were another Oxfordshire school btw).

[Gibson335]

Anyone use RM Connectivity? I have an idea of cost, but would like to know more about service from someone who uses it.

 

Cheers.

[CyberNerd]

Only issue to bear in mind is that not every ISP can act as DNS for a .sch.uk address. Our DNS records are still hosted by RM as a result, not that it's much hassle.

 

 

CSNewmedia can host them - We transferred over, now don't need to wait 2+ weeks for RM to fulfil a change request as we can do it online.