Provision of Broadband Services from April 2013 - what are you going to do?

[Brpilot99]

Our needs were simple so we changed from the SWGFL to a virgin business line 20 meg and a censornet box in house .... backed up by a netgear firewall/router ... saved us lots of £££££££'s .... The virgin line came with a free telephone line so we saved there as well !!

[Tsonga]

They offered us 6 but I asked for 12 and they just gave it to us free of charge.

 

I think we had 15 in the end. Did your install costs much? We had to have some paths dug up which was a bit of a farse.

[zag]

I think we had 15 in the end. Did your install costs much? We had to have some paths dug up which was a bit of a farse.

 

Nope it was free and just replaced an old ISDN line we already had installed.

[edutech4schools]

We currently have SWGfL's Easymail - one of my big worries is how we migrate the messages and settings to another system - assuming we move away from SWGfL

 

RM offer broardband and you can probably keep all your RM EasyMail.

 

When one of my schools looked in to it and RM offered a very good service for the price.

[TheScarfedOne]

Afaik RM ate moving easimail to office365 in the future so they may have a migration kit?

[Boredguy]

We have to pay ProRatia from April -> July and we should have the quote though on the 18th from Wilts/SWGfL and then we have to make a decision.

The document from Wilts is in the public domain as they uploaded it to Wisenet (which anyone can go read... interesting document tbh)

 

Once I'm back in the office next week I've the fun of looking at the quote and seeing what else is available ideally cheaper. Thankfully we host our own mail server (but I want it upgraded at some point) and we've got several fibre tails already blown into the serverroom from the exchange so connectivity shouldn't be too hard to switch. The headache would be reconfiguring all the firewall ports for the different services we have hosted plus an IP address changes as we've got Sims Learning Gateway to consider as well..

 

Ah the fun

[speckytecky]

One of the big advantages I have found up till now with SWGfL has been pretty good UK located Support - I don't know for sure but have a nagging concern that this has changed now. Certainly most of my recent support requests have been handled by people with very unfamiliar names? Things evolve but not always in the best ways!

[Boredguy]

I've found more of RM India answering online questions for the grid, but thats to be expected depending on the time and urgency of the call.

[Malph]

Looking for alternatives in Nottinghamshire for broadband provision- will be the next financial year. They are now devolving the budget for broadband provision- their 1c1n (one county, one network) and charging us primary schools a packet. They are saying if we move away we will lose their help desk support and data backup for SIMS, but I am wondering if we can save cash and get a decent alternative, especially if I get together with some other local primaries to negotiate a good deal.

Any there other Notts schools thinking of going their own way or other schools who have done this with good/bad experiences?

Edited March 12, 2013 by Malph

[Podium]

Looking for alternatives in Nottinghamshire for broadband provision- will be the next financial year. They are now devolving the budget for broadband provision- their 1c1n (one county, one network) and charging us primary schools a packet. They are saying if we move away we will lose their help desk support and data backup for SIMS, but I am wondering if we can save cash and get a decent alternative, especially if I get together with some other local primaries to negotiate a good deal.

Any there other Notts schools thinking of going their own way or other schools who have done this with good/bad experiences?

 

 

We are in Nottinghamshire and just had info from the LA that our bill is being doubled!! So yes we are looking for alternatives but not really too sure where to start. We were one of the early adopters of EMBC now 1c1n so not had to deal with ISP's for a long time.

Edited March 19, 2013 by Podium

[glennda]

We are in Nottinghamshire and just had info from the LA that our bill is being doubled!! So yes we are looking for alternatives but not really too sure where to start. We were one of the early adopters of EMBC now 1c1n so not had to deal with ISP's for a long time.

 

Well if its up in April you have looked a little late - lead time on most Leased lines is 90 days.

[Podium]

Well if its up in April you have looked a little late - lead time on most Leased lines is 90 days.

 

Which, I believe, is why they have only just informed us of the increase so we don't have time to change, which makes me want to find an alternative even more.

[glennda]

Which, I believe, is why they have only just informed us of the increase so we don't have time to change, which makes me want to find an alternative even more.

 

what do you currently use from your LEA? 10mb line? 20mb? Filtering? Anti-Spam web hosting etc?

[mrbios]

Having spoken to exa, schools broadband, exponential-e, Global AXS, M247, BT, SP-solutions and having revised pricing from SWGfL......i can safely say that the one I'm both most impressed with on the basis of SLA and additional services, and also happens to have been by far the best price for a leased line (not to mention providing exactly what we want in regards to firewall and filtering) is schools broadband

 

What we do next hinges entirely on what we do about our VLE, because if senior management decide they like MyBigCampus enough to replace our current dreadful uniservity VLE with it then we may be in a pretty strong position. Everything feels like it's coming together

[SchoolsBroadband]

Thanks @mrbios

 

that's very nice of you to say so. We won't let you down and we look forward to working with you soon

 

Dave

 

 

Having spoken to exa, schools broadband, exponential-e, Global AXS, M247, BT, SP-solutions and having revised pricing from SWGfL......i can safely say that the one I'm both most impressed with on the basis of SLA and additional services, and also happens to have been by far the best price for a leased line (not to mention providing exactly what we want in regards to firewall and filtering) is schools broadband

 

What we do next hinges entirely on what we do about our VLE, because if senior management decide they like MyBigCampus enough to replace our current dreadful uniservity VLE with it then we may be in a pretty strong position. Everything feels like it's coming together