misources

Will do, thanks Ben - I've found a couple of other threads on good filtering options. Appreciate all your input

Fantastic, thanks for your suggestions, those are great solutions to review

That's exactly how this came about :-) In our last governor's resources committee meeting we reviewed the finances and two governors expressed concern about the high cost of what seems to be a poor service. The head asked if we'd call our home provider's business arm to see what they could offer. Just what we've done. We're reporting back as per our normal governor process.

Thanks Ben - it's a primary school and it gets a few hours from an external support company. I've talked to the administrator who really struggles with this and she's more than happy for the help as is the head. Not sure I understand the comment about not shopping around? Our governing team will do all it can to help the school where it can augment and assist, just happy to help.

My apologies, I thought you were offering to point me to some guidance. A forum chat like this is of course interesting, but to fully assess this situation I'll need to review formal guidance and documentation. Your mention of legal issues made me assume there would be some online guidance for schools. As for stopping comparing to my home broadband...duly noted, I hereby cease! It doesn't stop me believing thought that there are many hidden costs and a distinct lack of value being offered in what my school currently recieves, as some of the responses have shown in comparing to their deals. I started this thread because I get very upset when a school with no IT understanding is potentially spending very scant money on an over-priced service. My only mission is to ensure the school spends everything it can on continuing to provide and improve teaching and learning in tough times. And tough times means looking for alternatives to expensive, bloated solutions sometimes!

This is really interesting and helps me realise how far out of line our costs are. The school is not rural at all, well built-up area with good connections. I'll start to shop around for the school now I've had all this great feedback.

Thanks Glennda - my only experience is with google apps, which has an extensive management panel that was of course developed for large corporations, who already trust them to run their service, like General Motors who I think have 100,000 users on or something. You can easily manage large groups of student i.d.'s and manage access, rights etc. Interesting you are running 2,000 mailboxes on exchange, that would cost a fortune compared to google apps when you factor in hardware investment, replacement, support, patching, back-up etc etc?

Interesting, thanks for sharing Ben.

Hey, sure, no problem - I'm a governor looking at ICT. Would welcome any official links to guidance on legal and practical issues of school broadband. What's your role?

This is really helpful, thanks for providing such a detailed response. Forgive me if I throw around the free/cheap examples liberally...I'm merely pointing out the other extremity to the expensive/high-end that is comparable to what only the most profitable businesses in the UK pay for. That's the context I'm trying to compare with. My starting point is what I consider highly, highly expensive, which you seem to agree with - £8.5k for a 10MB line.

Can you send me the links to other posts? Would love to read. As for your points....contention is largely a fallacy. When I test my home connection at various times of the day, I get 100MB during the working day, and around 40MB in the evening, so what's more important is what you actually recieve. Peak broadband usage is in the evening. So a school at ten a.m. on my line would get 100MB down, 10MB up. "Guaranteed" speed? So a school should pay 20x the amount I do to have someone TELL them a service is guaranteed? Not sure I get that, sorry. And the legal, safety, privacy issues is the one I know least about, but as I understand it, there are a lot of suppliers of filtering out there and it's very competitive, and certainly not enough to bump up the service to 20x what I'm paying for at home.

Quite simply the 20x delta between the cost of a very high quality service I recieve at home (£35 per month versus £700), to the one my school gets with 10% of the download speed (10MB at school, versus my 100MB), and the same upload speed (10MB each).

I'm sorry, but I have to push back on the e-mail one - a 'managed service' from a uk company is one that runs something like Exchange servers in a hugely costly way, and is only 'managed' because it's based on server technology designed for corporations in a client/server model. The exchange servers will fall over, or even the linux mail solution will go down because the hosting provider will have an outage. Gmail, or Hotmail, it makes no difference, is centrally run in some of the world's most efficient data centres run by some of the wealthiest companies on the planet who have a brand to maintain far more important than the company providing a 'managed' service. If you get Linux, you surely get this concept?!

Right, but to answer a few responses from above, at home I get 100MB down, and 10MB up...AND during the hours of 9am to 3pm when a school uses the cable from the residential road it's in, hardly anyone at all is sharing the connection. And as £35 per month is 5% the cost, I could take 3 lines if I liked?! And all this 'you get extra stuff' business...I just can't get over it...a 'managed' proxy server?! you mean some software a team of 2/3 kids could code in a weekend sitting on web server somewhere? Filtering? Ditto. E-mail?!!!!!!!! E-mail has been free FOREVER! Google Apps for Education is a classic example. Hosting?!!!! I've got an all-I-can-eat reseller hosting account that costs me £40 per month. Technical support? When has a broadband provider ever given technical support? I'm sorry, I just can't get over what an unbelievable heist is going on here. Schools like mine are being ripped off by a huge factor. Emperor. Clothes. New.

Hi, I'm new here so apologies if this question has been answered, but I'm just blown away by this... My local school spends £8.5k per year on broadband, the equivalent of around £700 per month. For 10MB ADSL. At home, 1 mile away, I get 100MB cable broadband for around £35 a month. Can someone help me understand?! I have one computer at home, getting 10x the speed of my school, for 5% of the cost?!! Something is wrong about this.