sinusoidal

Indeed, the school connections are already in place. However, in the 'new world', the idea will be that to save money, BT will use what is currently the CLEO network to connect a whole lot more than just schools.

'Can chose' doesn't mean they haven't chosen.

And as such they can chose to be part of the strategic partnership.

CLEO will become part of the strategic partnership and will be run by the 'new company' consisting of staff from County Hall and BT when the contract with LUNS ends in Feburary.

SecureACL exceptions for internal CLEO traffic are implemented by CLEO/LUNS and not at a county level, assuming you are talking about the Lancs firewall team. There should not be a problem opening AD ports between two sites which have a reciprocal agreement.

I can confirm that those looking after CLEO are also regularly called out in the middle of the night to go up mountains to core radio sites and replace router and radio parts to fix outages that are never seen by schools the following morning. There was a seperate radio power failure in Kendal on Tuesday morning which may have caused some slowness in that area, but there were no other problems following the planned outages; though I can't speak for the ngfl server farm, but I haven't heard of anything. Believe me, we do always have the users in mind and we aren't just single mindedly doing as we please. This is partly why Janet enforce the outage window rigidly. I have worked in schools before and been on the end of outages and I understand the problems and disruption they bring. The network is being heavily upgraded at the moment in its entirety, and there is never a good time to have a planned outage. I for one would happily conduct network at risk work earlier, but we aren't permitted to. It's worth noting that a lot of pre-work did actually intentionally occur towards the end of last summer holidays - even this caused problems as there are a fair number of sites which are in over the holidays. These upgrades are mainly to improve the core links and routers so that they can support all high schools having 100Mb and primaries 10Mb If you think about the 1200+ schools the network supports, that adds up to a fair amount of traffic and managing it isn't trivial. Indeed, part of these upgrades is to increase the amount of resilience in the network so that failure cannot cause such disruption. We are gradually trying to address the problems identified by schools, and I hope we can work with you rather than be seen to be working against you with this. Unfortunately with all the shared requirements of the network (some sites have greater technical skillsets than others/some want different things from their connection - and I believe we must start to take that into account), changes and decisions can take a while to reach fruition.