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We are proud to announce our sponsorship of Joe Girling who will be driving under the banner of M247 Racing. Joe Girling will be competing for the Jack Sears trophy in the British Touring Car Championships 2013. 22 year old racing driver Joe Girling has said about this season that, “It’s quite daunting to be honest but it’s obviously very exciting too” “To be racing in the same events as the likes of Matt Neal and Jason Plato is a little surreal, but I’ll be aiming to keep my head down and produce some decent results. I am not one to make bold claims and I’m sure it will take me a little while to acclimatise to it all, but I am confident in my own ability and the Cruze is also a very capable car.” M247 Technical Director, Chris Byrd explains: “M247 operate some of the most technically advanced datacentres and networks in Europe, so it seemed appropriate for us to partner with an equally innovative and forward-thinking team. We wish Joe the best of luck for the season and we’re looking forward to seeing him in action.” Follow the action on ITV or through M247.com/racing, Facebook facebook.com/m247racing and @m247racing on twitter. We have VIP passes available over the season that give access to the paddocks, the drivers and the track. We will do some competition draws over the next few months for anyone that requests a connectivity quote from us and mentions that they saw this on Edugeek

Hi, My personal choice would be to move on to something more hardware based, but it honestly depends on what you are looking to achieve. Smoothwall is great for the content filtering, then maybe a SonicWALL or a Palo Alto if you are looking for more granular application control and things like that. I am not sure though that you will get many options for importing your old rules. We not so long ago helped one of the universities in Norwich to move away from ISA and we had to rebuild all the rules for them. It is actually not that bad as you often find a load of the rules are old or obsolete anyway.

Hi All, We live in an ever changing world and even more so in IT and telecomms. Our own network which spans Europe has to take in to account all of the bits that GrumbleDook mentioned and it becomes a much bigger proposition when you are not just dealing with a local area. That said, there are always economies of scale that can be taken in to account and the ability to utilise fibre that is already in the ground. At the end of the day the customer demands reducing prices and when you are trying to grow and expand a network, that is very difficult to balance. I am not saying we have got it totally right yet, but we are getting there. In many instances now, we can be cheaper that the network owners pricing, even though we are actually using their fibre!

Hi, For those not knowing what access points we are talking about, they are these - Unifi | Ubiquiti Networks, Inc. We have just done a proof of concept for a leisure centre in Essex before rolling out to some of their other sites. It is performing really well and within the first 4 days the 4 access points had already handled close to 500 unique devices with no issues. The rate limiting on users joining has been working well too. All connected to a triple bonded ADSL solution. So simple, but it just works.

Hello EduGeek. As the proud sponsor of the ‘How do you do it?’ forum I thought it best to give a quick introduction to us here at M247, who we are and what it is we do. M247 is an independent and privately owned Internet Infrastructure and ICT company based in Manchester that has been trading since 2003. And as a company we have a policy that we reinvest a significant amount of our profits back into R&D, ensuring we have an eye on the future and that M247 plans to be a major player for many years to come. We offer an increasing range of connectivity products which are getting better, more competitive and more sophisticated all of the time and have a successful history supplying end-to-end connectivity and data security solutions to the Education Sector, Working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week serving customers in every time zone on the planet all year round, we operate one of the most modern privately owned networks which has a massive capacity and extensive reach into Europe. We also have an extensive and expanding advanced 10 / 20 Gbps IP and MPLS network connected directly to 7 of the world's largest and most important Internet exchanges. Our resilient European network ring spans Manchester, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris and Brussels with our own full London bypass. We also have direct peering relationships with 70% of all the European ISPs Operating from our own two data centres with an efficiency rating of PUE 1.18, we are among the most environmentally friendly and green providers in Europe. We don’t need to buy green credits or plant trees, we just use less power than our competitors. Our growing list of offerings currently include: • DSL • Leased Lines • EFM • IPVPN • Wholesale Broadband • Data and Network Security • High Bandwidth Connectivity • Dedicated Servers and Colocation • Scalable Cloud Solutions • 365 Day UK Technical Support • Friendly, versatile and knowledgeable team When all of these are brought together they contribute to a viable digital ecosystem where internet technologies, bright creative ideas and 21st century businesses can gel and thrive. If you want to contract us direct please use the following details or simply PM me @psillars M247 Ltd - 0161 615 1270

Hi We know of a number of schools that have gone this route but they weren't primary schools. If you can link the schools together quite easily network wise then it certainly could work. It will probably come down to the total amount you are paying for the connectivity you get and then getting some quotes from various providers. You would just need to check if there were any other services that you can only get if connected to your LA We only have experience from the provider side but I sure there are many others here that will be able to help from the school side of things Paul

In most instances what you currently have running will continue to work, but you may just need to take care of a few of the "pieces" of the puzzle yourself. The content filtering is probably the starting point. You will need to decide if you want the ISP to do it centrally, with you having full control, or if you want to install and manage it locally, for example by installing a Smoothwall. You may need to sort out your local Anti Virus solution as well, but there are lots of cost effective solutions out there. You will need some sort of firewall that you can allow remote access in to your network and of course a few static external IP addresses that you can use for this. In most instances I think people are moving away from Local Authority provided solutions, either due to the cost and or combined with getting the true speed of connection they are paying for. In many instances we see schools that are on a 100Mb/s connection and only get 20Mb/s. You may not need to go straight to a 100Mb/s connection, but somewhere around 30Mb/s You can always upgrade it (check with your ISP) any time during the contract. Just my take on things, from what I have seen over the last few years.

Tom, You say the nicest things ! It was great to spend a couple of days with the Smoothwall guys in Southampton and thinking about how to get the most out of Smoothwalls within our network. I must admit I was left a little head numb after it all but certainly got me thinking and looking forward to some great stuff ahead. Paul

Hi Many schools have a smoothwall device for the content filtering. It may be slightly overkill for the number of PCs you have. You could look at a SonicWALL NSA 240 with content filtering which would give a nice firewall/content filtering solution. Just my thoughts. Paul

Hi, It may be worth chatting to Meru networks as I think this is something they may offer in their range of wireless products. Paul

The Kaspersky solution is a really solid and works well. I believe GlobalAXS/M247 who advertise on here can get some good deals and trial keys if required. Paul

Hi. The other option is that depending on your provider they could probably just provide you a private network over the EFMs taking out the need for additional units. Paul

Hi, I just did a google on the word SonicWALL and found a few online retailers selling SonicWALLs. The NSA 240 looks like it starts at around £698 + Vat but there may be some other offers around. I hope this helps Paul

Hi, There is also PRTG which may be worth a look. Very good and at a good price point. Paul

Hi walker01642 I was wondering. Have you installed the single signon agent for the SonicWALL install to help it work out the actual user logged in? Paul

Hi, This in essence is correct but could be expanded slightly. There are two points of contention. The first is the point from your local exchange to the ISPs backbone and then from the ISPs backbone to the Internet. The ISP incurs most of it's cost getting the traffic from your exchange to their backbone. The bit out on to the internet is cheap. If you stick with the broadband example then the cost to get the traffic from the backbone to the Internet is less than 1% of the cost of getting it from your exchange to the backbone. Most contention on broadband comes from ISPs controlling the bandwidth used from the exchange to the backbone to keep costs predictable. Leased lines come with zero contention and although carried in the same way have guaranteed bandwidth. Not sure if that helps a little more. Paul

Hi, If you are looking for a cheaper entry point, depending on your distance from the exchange, there is a product called EFM - Ethernet in the First Mile. It sits between broadband and leased lines. It comes in over copper and uses bonded copper pairs to provide the service. If you are around 1000m to 2000m from an enabled exchange you should be able to get around 15 - 20mbs up and down for around £300 a month. Not as good as a leased line but better than SDSL or broadband. Paul