Brpilot99

I changed my 2 schools to Virgin over a year ago .... never looked back since ... great pricing for what we want and Censornet filtering ..

Just as a tangent ... if you want to help save the planet look at the power consumption .... I bought a Phillips 55 inch recently ... great picture but also A++ power rating.

I set my firewall to not allow any IP's through that are in my dhcp range ... Therefore anything that gets its ip from the dhcp server wont access the internet. As the proxy server is a fixed ip outside of the range it can get to the outside world. My servers are also fixed ip's and can access outside ....

I've done this for 2 schools now .... Virgin broadband Censornet filtering ... Netgear firewall. Bought a small pbx for the phones and have 2 Virgin tel lines in a Hunt group plus the freebe that came with the broadband. Very smooth switchover and no problems so far in one year since the transfer .... Saved each school a packet of cash !!!

Thanks once again ... so what would the high cost solution be to the the one room scenario? IE lets say we wanted to have 30 devices all running at a reasonable speed together given that the room is a box if you see what I mean ...

Hiyah and thanks for your detailed information. Our kids go up to year 2 !! They dont download files and generally go to sites such as Education city and Mathletics .... I understand the maths side of the details and assume putting all the clever stuff to one side and in our situation that that will be the same for all access points? Business or not ... If I wanted for example to give each client (of 25) 4 meg instead of 2 could I simply add an access point? (with channels setup accordingly) Or are there points that beat the inevitable maths and are switches rather than hubs? We dont use POE so thats not a problem I dont think our clients support MIMO they are standard N netbooks and a few tablets. Thanks for you help so far !! Cheers Brian

Thanks everybody for the replies .... Our situation is that we've had a survey and the result was that we will need one access point per room (12 Classrooms) ... its the oldest school in poole with 2.5 feet thick walls every where (they built them proper in those days !!! . We dont need vlans or any of the fancy stuff just decent throughput so the kids can logon and get the internet. (its just internet .. no streaming etc). The network handles user security. And we have a separate firewall.. WPA2 security is fine. The business points Ive seen seem to offer so much we dont need. From my viewpoint a simple access point in a closed box which is pretty much what our rooms are is much the same as any other ... maybe I'm wrong here .... Neilmac These are the ones Ive been looking at TP-Link Wireless N 300Mbps Access Point (TL-WA801ND.) - www.misco.co.uk I can set them up manually so no channels overlap ... they come with intelligent channel detection and can be setup sothey act according to what nearby channels they detect. Any input would be appreciated Cheers

Hi everybody .... We've been looking at our wireless and have talked to a number of people on the subject. Ive been putting in each classroom a single 300mb twin antenna access point at 24.99 from Misco. (We have old thick walls so common points don't work) We have been told that we need to put in Business Class access points !!! Does anybody know what the difference is? To my mind a point that gives you up to (in theory at least) 300 mps should suffice for 15 tablets using the internet ... Thanks in advance

Ebays worth a shot ...

I came back from the hols to find the staff have been given each a brand new (very cheap) Surface RT tablet. Very nice with a solid feel to them and the metro interface looks very pretty!. A couple of days later I had a complaint that the wireless is not working as they cant run Integrisg2. They get to the login screen OK but after that they just hang loading the subsequent page ... I called Integris G2 support and they advise that G2 is mainly Java. Ive googled and it seems that RT will not run Java!! Has anybody had experience of this and maybe an answer? Thanks in advance ..

My 2 primaries now use Censornet after having left the SWGFL .... you can have cloud filtering or if you want it will run on a low spec local machine. I bought a pair of the HP mini servers at £120.00 each. Its linux based with a very nice web front end. Very easy to manage . They are IWF accredited and are a pleasure to talk to ...

Fn F5 is normally for switching the VGA output ... The HDMI will normally handshake with the device its connected to and just work !!! What resolution is the laptop set to? Maybe its set to high for the TV ....

I have moved both of my schools from the LEA offering ... they are both about the same size as you. We went for a Virgin Business 20 meg line at about 42.00 per month. I monitor the speed and we get 18-20 meg all of the time. The upload speed is about 2 meg. As we dont do a lot of uploading this is perfectly ok for our needs. The installation was a breeze and they have both run flawlessly ... We went for inline Censornet software installed on one of those really cheap HP mini servers. They have a cloud offering as well ... Again the setup was easy and the intelligent filtering works very well. cost £300.00 per year ... I purchased a Netgear router for each school cost £180.00 each. The bonus with the Virgin line is that you get a free telephone line included !! All in all were very happy with the result and at a fraction of the cost.

Heads Up !!! Tesco now offering a 0% interest for a year and 0% transfer fee credit card !! Extra clubcard points if you use it for shopping ....