SchoolsBroadband

on the whole we find them a lot better than they used to be. I forgot to say that as part of the install BT will waives the first £2800 and a bit of ECC charges. So you only pay what's on top of that. Thanks Dave

Yes, that's called a BT Openreach Ethernet Access Direct circuit. If you want one do let me know, happy to quote Dave

The cost to an Openreach communications provider for a point to point Ethernet Access Direct or an school to exchange Ethernet Access Direct Local Access circuit is actually £1,850 + any ECC costs. Most carriers (such as Talk Talk, Vodafone, BT wholesale etc) either charge this on a 12 month contract or amortise the cost over 3 years. BT Openreach always charges the carrier £1,850 for a 100Mbit or 1Gbit circuit. 10Gbit circuits are around the £5 - £6k mark to install if memory serves me correctly. Thanks Dave

I'll very politely disagree with you here @Wave9_Lee as you make a lot of valid comments on a lot of threads and I certainly do consider you a "good egg" My view (and the general industry) is that all services are going to cloud based solutions. e.g take Office 365 email for example going from an onsite exchange server to the cloud, or MIS etc etc. My view is that onsite filtering and firewalling is in exactly the same vein as this as its just another application. IF a cloud hosted solution has had enough investment and is a reliable service then I and the industry as a whole agrees the service should be put in the cloud unless there's a very specific reason it needs to be onsite. The problem of course can be with the implemention of this. I'm sure you (and others) may think thats a bit rich when we had considerable issues with our hosted Lightspeed service in the past (although this wasn't directly our fault) as have some other ISP's recently which post here. What I can say is that if it is done properly (and we've invested over £500,000 in our new Netsweeper platform) that a high uptime can be achieved whilst giving greater functionality than using onsite devices. We have 100% uptime of our hosted Netsweeper content filtering and Fortigate UTM platform which in our opinion gives the best in class filtering and security for education and has now been running for nearly 2 years. There's also a huge advantage using cloud based solutions as it gives you a single management interface to all of your sites. This is really where MAT's in particular massively benefit as they can easily push changes to all sites at a click of a button and users can move between sites and take their profiles with them. This in our experience is much more difficult and costly to do as well as providing little to no resiliency if an onsite box goes bang. Also think about upgrading the software and change control of this on 20 different boxes. Again more management overhead and the end customer will have to test this in their environment for software bugs etc, where as if its managed in the cloud the MSP does this on their behalf. Also, using a cloud based scalable platform means that onsite UTM and filtering hardware doesn't need to be upgraded when faster line speeds are being introduced. With the advent of G.Fast pushing 350Mbit, FTTP running at 1Gbit and most secondary schools now taking 1Gbit leased lines our schools haven't had to upgrade any onsite devices. We just "turn up the taps" in the cloud and give them more UTM and filtering power. Finally (and I'm sure you're all getting bored now!) if there are any outages in the cloud to a specific piece of kit that shouldn't matter as the high availability environment just spreads the load (we use F5 and Cisco equipment to do this) over other servers and UTM devices to take the strain. If you have a single onsite device then generally you have to wait until the next day to get a new one. And another thing finally, by putting this all in the cloud a WAN is very easily made by terminating all connections into the core infrastructure rather than putting real world IP address on a customer site. This means all connections are WAN ready from day 1 so you can easily migrate to a WAN if required. We've numerous MAT's of over 30 schools in total which really do benefit from our cloud platform and save a heck of a lot of resource in management time whilst centralising their IT function. Positive comments always appreciated Thanks Dave

@MrWu we did win best security at the last two Internet Service Provider Awards for our hosted Fortigate and Netsweeper filtering platform to the education sectorbeating a lot of other major providers See https://www.ispa.org.uk/ispa-awards/previous-winners/2018-2/ and I quote "Security Award: Talk Straight Winning for the second year running, the judges felt that Talk Straight’s focus on schools, starting the education and awareness on the importance of cyber security as early as possible, along with impressive customer support, made them deserved winners." But even better I'd suggest speaking with @snagrat and co. Thanks for considering us. Dave

+1 for Schools Broadband Thanks for all the kind words and to you too Nick and yes, the Netsweeper filtering and Fortigate firewall has had 100% uptime since its inception. Dave

Hi @Badaz52, I can't comment on losing the functionality from the Smoothwall box but our hosted Fortigate and Netsweeper in conjunction with our leased line services can dish out IP addresses to VLAN'ed wifi access across virtual interfaces. We'd be happy to show you a webinar if need be. Do drop me a PM if its of interest. Thanks Dave

Prices have certainly gone down quite a lot over the past 12 months. We see most secondary schools taking a full 1Gbit connection now. Although CityFibre had the upper hand on pricing on 1Gbit circuits 12 months ago I don't see that being so going forward as we see both BT and Virgin now being similar wholesale pricing and then there's Dark Fibre which we can do too. @Primus is right regarding UTM boxes. I can't comment on Smoothwall or Sophos but i'd say never trust the tech specs. We've put Fortigate firewalls in testing labs and got nowhere near the UTM throughput they're supposed to do in real world scenarios with multiple functions turned on. We have seen this occur specifically when customers going to high speed lines that their firewalls can't keep up. This is why we have very big cloud hosted and virtualised Fortigate firewalls so if you need to up your bandwidth from say 300Mbit to 1Gbit then no problem we just open the taps a bit more and give you more resource so you don't have to buy a new Firewall Thanks Dave P.S if you need a quote feel free to send me a PM as I know we'll be competitive

Hi @DeGrimmy, I've just sent this over to @RobMason who is our product manager. This isn't something I was personally aware of but let me look into it for you and I'll get back in touch. Thanks Dave

I'd suggest taking a look at the release notes for the next version of the software and upgrading to that or a newer one if the issue is fixed. Also you can tell which policy is being hit the most by putting counters on it from what I remember. If you've one policy which is being hit a huge amount of times then check it and alter it as you may have put too much UTM functionality on it which hammers the CPU. I've seen bugs like that before in Fortigate and an OS upgrade fixed it. Thanks and good luck Dave

This should be possible, particularly if you use a completely separate line for MIS access and the MIS stays on static external IP addresses. Dave

Hello, we're here of course and specialise in multi academy trusts. We've well over 1,000 schools using our service nationwide and our service can include education specific filtering and security. If you're just the two schools and you're a stones throw away then putting in your own fibre cable is a great idea and will reduce your costs. Alternatively if you can't do that then we could install a BT or Virgin point to point fibre line which can then piggyback from the main leased line so you can share your Internet connection. Send me PM if you wish to know more. Thanks Dave

Hi Neville, if this is with us then that's definitely doable and is pretty standard. Please call the support desk and they'll resolve this for you or show you how to do it. Thanks Dave

we can always port your numbers onto our SIP trunks if you like. Its easy to do just let me know. Thanks Dave

of course. Following my PM I've already forwarded on to our team. As per my chat with our partner above I always recommend taking SIP connectivity from the same provider as your broadband. This gives sole responsibility to them for getting it fixed. Remember, the Internet is "the wild west" and we can't control time sensitive applications after the packet / call has left our network. If you do SIP with us then we do end to end QOS all the way into our carriers. The calls don't even touch the Internet so this problem shouldn't happen if you have SIP direct with us and our connectivity. Thanks Dave

I certainly hope so but I don't know yet. If there is then we will pass on. Dave

Gamma and we had all of our horizon customers affected today. See https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/14/smashed_gammas_horizon_cloud_pbx_down_and_out/ also They have a webinar at 09:30 tomorrow morning to go over the issue but I believe it was a security patch update by broadsoft gone wrong. Sorry @fiza for disruption caused. Our call centre was too unfortunately. Dave

Sure Rob. I'll send you a PM with my mobile. Dave

SD WAN can be useful for sites where connectivity is expensive. I think its more of a nice to have than everyone needs it. We are starting to see some schools request this in quotes. But there's a premium to pay which is mostly in the customer premise equipment to do it properly which with schools budgets as they are I suspect most will not want to pay. The one thing I do like about SD WAN is the ability to use two or more links at the same time which is useful. A secondary school could buy say a 200Mbit leased line but have a secondary 330Mbit G.Fast connection. Put all critical apps and latency sensitive apps down the leased line and other apps and general browsing down the G.Fast connection. We can then also put each circuit using different carriers too for extra resiliency. Again though, will people pay for it or not?! Dave

Out of interest we are contemplating an enhanced paid for DDoS protection service. My concerns though is that everyone will expect it for free which we can ill afford to put in at a cost to ourselves. So my question is, what would a school pay for enhanced cloud based DDoS protection???? Dave

Remember using FTTC does not give you guaranteed speeds (unless you use an EoFTTC product and even then only some of that is guaranteed). If you want guaranteed speeds you need to go leased line. Take for example BT's new ultrafast products. They can in theory go to 330Mbit at the moment but BT Retail will only guarantee a speed of 100Mbit. Dave

hi Rob, I'm presuming you mean ipads at home etc on 3G / 4G? If so they yes. We're about to launch a 4G sim which we can terminate in exactly the same was as a leased line or FTTC / DSL based connection. So that device will get exactly the same kind of security and filtering as if you were onsite. There is also Forticlient (Fortinets Endpoint protection) too which pushes out the same security settings onto remote devices. I'd love to sell lots of this but most schools find it too expensive compared to say Sophos or ESET. Ping me a PM if you've got some specific questions or give me a call. More than happy to talk things through. Dave

You are 100% right. If you get a DDoS and you have a direct internet connection with onsite firewall then this will get easily saturated until your ISP attempts to put a block to it. Putting big firewalls in the cloud does help to reduce DDoS impacts as they soak up the DDoS in our data centres first. Ours do this already. We get DDoS'd at least once a week and customers normally don't notice. Thanks Dave

In my opinion for best speeds and value for money you want to put a big leased line in one connection and then BT Ethernet access direct (EAD) point to point links atn100mbit or 1gbit. They are very affordable and allow you to share internet bandwidth from the main site and also transfer files intersite very quickly. We've done dozens of these in the same situation you describe. You can even terminate them on your own switches rather than our routers if you like. Happy to help look at your requirements and help design something for you. I'll send you a pm. Dave

I can't speak highly enough of Fortigate UTM devices. They're not in Gartners top quadrant by accident. They are also not licenced on a per user basis, but on a per device basis with different options which included sandboxing, Internet of compromise etc etc See https://www.fortinet.com/fortios for a full feature set. If you want a quote on one or you wanted to use our highly resilient cloud hosted virtualised appliances we can simply "sit on top of" your Internet connection then we'd be happy to do that too. We've won awards at the Internet Service Provider award ceremony the last two years running for our hosted Fortigate and Fortianalyzer service. It really is very good. Happy to answer any specific questions you may have. Dave