SchoolsBroadband

Hi all, Just to clarify things. We do absolutely no traffic management and throttling of connections on anything in our network. We've actually got oodles of spare capacity having doubled the amount of netsweeper servers over the last month. Weve plenty of customers on full 1Gbit leased lines that constantly get thr full 1Gbit. I should also point out that over the last month our network is really quiet due to summer holidays so I can assure you @andy_b weve definitley not purposefully throttled you. However that doesnt mean you, we or the carrier providing the underlying circuit doesnt have an issue. On a handful of occasions I've seen capacity issues with the underlying carrier which miraculously fix themselves once we apply a lot of pressure but aren't normally quick fixes. That said I've not seen one which limits port 80 traffic before. We will continue to look into it for you. @RobMason built our netsweeper platform so if theres an issue there he will find it. Thanks for your patience. We can out the solution here once we find out where the issue is. Dave

also check your duplex and what it's locked at between our router and your switch and confirm with our support. if it's negotiating at 100Mbit then that's going to be a bottleneck. Dave

that's not right...…. Best give the support team a call. I wonder if you've an MTU issue..... Send me a PM if you like and i'll get them to call you directly. Thanks Dave

I just tested fast.com on our office leased line. got 67Mbit with it but using speedtest.net we got 98Mbit on our 100Mbit office leased line...…….

Hi @Badaz52 firstly thanks very much for using our service Use http://www.speedtest.net and use our speedtest server (called Talk Straight based in Ilkley). We can also do some iperf tests with your help. A lot of the speedtests sites on the Internet don't give accurate results when used with high capacity lines such as the one you have. If both of these are not returning results of near enough a gig then we will do further investigation as it'd either be a misconfiguration our side (unlikely but could happen) or a capacity and / or network issue with the wholesale carrier we've used which we need to take up with them. Please contact the support team on 0 11 33 222 333 and they'll help you out. Thanks Dave

I can cast iron guarantee we do not rake in the profits when it comes to hosted VoIP systems!!!!!!

Forticloud is good and you can do reports by username depending on how your setup works with the installed Fortigate. Fortianalyzer has more functionality than Forticloud. There are example reports you can see on the Fortinet website. Although good, we find Netsweeper reporting is better for filtering than Forticloud or Fortianalyzer. I cant comment on Sophos but I think theres been a few threads on here saying reporting is a bit lacking. Any questions then do send me a PM as we are an accredited Fortinet MSSP. Thanks Dave

hi again @TMBS, we've priced our VoIP to be comparable to onsite systems. The main issue we found that for secondary schools with lots of phones most of them aren't used in earnest so why have a call bundle and high rental associated to them when you wouldn't have that with an onsite system? I'm sure our pricing is very competitive. Thanks to @Edu-IT and @andyfield for the nice comments. Dave

Hi @TMBS, from recollection we should be quite a bit more competitive than Atomwide on pricing. Ours works similarly. We recommend doing a separate VLAN on your network so we can easily segregate the traffic back to our core. This allows us to do end to end quality of service. We normally sell Yealink as they're very price competitive but if you wanted Cisco handsets we can do that too there just a little more expensive. We've thousands of handsets out there and quite a few customers on here that use it. Thanks Dave

This can actually be changed on Netsweeper as we have done this for our customers.

@TechMonkey no problem. Just so you know though we actually extend the perimeter of your network effectively into our cloud based and virutalised Fortigates. Very useful if you want to bring any other sites in as part of a WAN as then you only need one cloud based firewall and we then link them together over our network. There's no extra cost for this. We've about 1,500 schools using it at the moment so its quite well tested Thanks Dave

@TechMonkey Netsweeper (filter only), Fortinet (filter and UTM / firewall) and Lightspeed (filter only) are all very good at reporting (although Fortinet also needs FortiAnalzyer or Forticloud to enhance it to be Prevent compliant). We've now over 1,000 schools using our Fortinet firewall and Netsweeper filter solution so they have the best of both worlds. No capex costs as it's all in the cloud. We also put proactive Prevent compliant reports on as standard which includes full SSL decrypt. If its of interest do send me a PM, we'd be happy to give you a tender response. Good luck. Dave

Yes that's correct. We have experimented with other variations I the past though. If you send me a PM I'll check what you've got and make sure it's being billed correctly. Cheers Dave

We don't do it that way. We do pay for the licence and then pay for the number of call bundles / concurrent calls you want to make. Some of our licences can go under £2pm depending on how many you buy. We found that for secondary schools in particularly bundling calls in with every handset just isn't economically viable for a school that often has phones sitting there doing very little so way pay for call bundles for them? Dave

Hi @Michael, we only do hosted VoIP systems and have for the past 12 years! I believe there's a lot of benefits from doing it in the cloud rather than onsite. In fact i'm a big believe in nearly all services going to the clouds in different guises over time. Phones are just another application that can sit elsewhere. We've thousands of our My School Phones handsets out there and it's certainly a lot cheaper than the other prices quoted here so feel free to send me a PM if you'd like a quote If you need any advice feel free to get in touch too. Thanks Dave

Hi @meadowgirl we do this for lots of schools around the country already. @localzuk has summarised all options very well. I'd like to add a couple of things though for you to think about. 1. How much data do you want to send between sites? This is important is considering in putting a site to site fibre (e.g. an Ethernet Access Direct (EAD)) may be quite expensive, particularly if both sites connect via a different BT Telephone Exchange. Any supplier will be able to easily tell you what the price is an if an EAD would go via two different telephone exchanges. If you use a lot of data then a point to point Ethernet circuit would be good. If you use a small amount of data then an IPSEC VPN or MPLS / VPLS on the suppliers core network and using hosted based filtering and firewalling would work very nicely too. 2. If you did put in a direct point to point circuit then following on from @FN-GM s comment I'd also recommend putting in a circuit at each site but using different underlying carriers AND a different access technology. e.g. site 1 has a fibre leased line using Talk Talk, site 2 uses an FTTC/ G.Fast / FTTP connection from an alternative underlying carrier. This gives you carrier resiliency. However if the fibre was cut at site 1 then it's likely the EAD will also go down as they'll use the same route back to the local telephone exchange. 3. For the ultimate setup use Virgin fibre at site 1 with a BT EAD to site 2 and then use an FTTC or 4G solution at site 2 as the backup connection. 4. Furthering all that SD-WAN is now here too just to complicate things even more! Feel free to send me a PM or give me a call if you want some advice. Cheers and good luck Dave

have you run out of unallocated IP's from the DHCP pool? i.e. there's no more to give? you might want to look at your dhcp timeout settings and reduce accordingly or make the pool size bigger.

Hi Tracey, If you call the support desk they'll look into it for you. By default it should be banned so I wonder if there's been some configuration changes on your netsweeper instance? Thanks Dave

Hi @steveo1565, we've thousands of extensions installed in schools over a couple of hosted VoIP systems we do. Our My School Phones hosted VoIP is the most popular with most extension rentals sub £3 depending on your requirements so should work well for you. It works on any broadband provider although we'd recommend taking a line with ourselves so we can do end to end quality of service. Thanks Dave

massive internal DDoS targeted at the web admins specifically. You should already be back up. We're investigating. Dave

Hi @jc_itm we're already in touch with @TMBS. Sorry to hear you've had issues too. I'll send you a PM and get it resolved asap. Thanks Dave

hi @TMBS, really sorry about that. I will go get an engineer as quick as I can to call you as we do fully support this. Thanks Dave

you're welcome. I've sent you a PM again on some things you need to do when moving over. If they don't work let me know and I'll get an engineer to look into it for you. Please use our own speedtest.net server (Talk Straight Ilkley) to do some speed testing with as that'll give the most reliable results although we can also do iperf tests as well but I'd need to get an engineer to talk through that with you also. Thanks Dave

hi @MrWu, I'd recommend using a trace ping command which will send constant pings to each network hop along the way. if you're getting high latency at any point this could indicate an issue on that router. That's just a start of course and there are many more tests that can be done. The support guys are correct in what they say as off-net connections are a temporary solution which we've used to help in your specific circumstance. They generally work fine but depending on your ISP and its network and our interconnects into it (via transit / peering etc) will affect its speed so we can't guarantee speed into another ISP's network unless we have a specific agreement with them to do so. This though is the same for any cloud based service on the Internet if it's not "on net" to the same carrier. Take Azure for example, they don't give you guaranteed speeds into that service unless you purchase Microsoft Express Connect, otherwise it's best efforts. I've sent you a PM though with a few things to try which can help. Thanks Dave

We're now starting to see similar or even lower wholesale costs from other carriers to city fibre. Also BT is really starting to motor on its fttp roll out. Expect a lot more schools to have this over the next couple of years. Dave