Broadband Provider - How Much?!?!

[RobFrain]

We have just had a meeting with our Bursar to discuss annual costs and our budget. I was shocked to hear that our Broadband cost to CLEO is £9000 a year. We do have a 100mb fibre cable which is filtered with netsweeper, however I just wanted to see if this rougly what everyone else is paying. We're a secondary school with 750 students.

 

 

 

Rob

[CyberNerd]

Thats good for 100Mb/s provided it's not contended.

[RobFrain]

Thats good for 100Mb/s provided it's not contended.

 

Really?! I was shocked at the price. Yes its a direct fibre from our exchange not shared with anyone.....

 

[glennda]

Pretty Good price

 

 

Don't compare to home broadband costs! There are multiple threads on here about why not. Thats about 3 k less then we pay just for the line.

[jamesfed]

Wow that is a nice price - we are paying £10k/yr for our 100mb line

 

Stick with it - the price is good!!

[bashy]

Great Price we pay twice that for 50 mb

[synaesthesia]

Here we can get 100mbit for about that from RM, little cheaper with collaborative buying. Aiming to get other suppliers to a similar cost, but otherwise you can add another 3k onto that price with standard filtering.

[Sylv3r]

£13k-ish for 10mb which sometimes pushes to 30mb if we are lucky. We were paying around £21k with the same LA supplier a year or two ago so it has reduced somewhat over the years.

[twin--turbo]

The price is nice but is it the full price.

 

We ditched cleo a few years back when we got a chance, from what we were told Cumbria LEA top sliced the "Harnessing Technology Grant" to pay for CLEO. When we got a FULL bill as we were not being funded by the LEA it was near £35K for Cleo connection and services. Ehhhh, yeah BYE BYE.

 

So your 9K may be topped up elswhere in the funding stream, from conversations I have had with other schools LUNS is cheaper than CLEO. I have yet to fully find an answer to the LUNS/BT/CLEO relationship but it's strange.

 

100/100 for 9K is a reasonable price to the EDU if no more money is being pumped in elswhere.

 

BUT...

 

BIG BUT

 

BIG BIG BIG BIG BUT....

 

 

You don't need 100Mb...

 

We had 100/100 Direct from BT, we have 1200ish client machines. I cut it to 40/100 and not had a single complaint and My account manager reccond we could get to 20/100 as peak was showing as 19Mb. Droping to 40/100 cut the cost dramaticaly but it's still not very cheap ( Prices have come down since we signed up)

 

Cleo/Luns have the advantage of having private fiber in the ground, but they also have the liability they need to fund long term.

 

So a bit of hard barginign on the Bandwidth may see a £££ gain for the establishment.

 

Rob

[SchoolsBroadband]

£9k is a good price for a 100Mbit leased line although it does depend where you are exactly.

 

Also do you get the fast speeds all of the time?

 

Forgive me if I'm wrong but I think the CLEO pricing is a set amount for bandwidth then so many pounds per student per year? If so as you're quite a small secondary school then that's probably why your price is low.

 

Leased line pricing depends on many factors normally which are the following

 

Distance from BT local node

Distance from other fibre provider local fibre e.g. Virgin

Speed

Contention ratio (BT for example offer a 5:1 wholeasle fibre option)

Is there another LLU provider in the exchange? e.g. If we want to we could use a BT Ethernet Access Direct Local Access circuit back to the telephone exchange and then use an LLU carrier such as O2 or Talk Talk to use backhaul from their network back to the Internet.

 

Just so you know we've sold 100Mbit leased lines from as little as £7.5kpa all the way to £18kpa. They really can change dramatically dependent on the above criteria.