SchoolsBroadband

@justanittech We support Captive portal, Radius and IP based filtering for BYOD. For devices offsite it's proxy, chrome plugin and / or captive portal. For onsite school controlled devices we generally use an agent for PC's and MAC, Chrome plugin for Chromebooks and captive portal for anything else. All tie into AD or Google Auth. Thanks Dave

I know sometimes some of the ports are not hardware accelerated either. So make sure you're using ones which are!

One to think about is how would you do BYOD filtering properly if you can't install anything on a device? Dave

that's correct it does and only when the wind blows. As a Fortinet Gold MSSP I think we can make fair comment on this. We've been to Fortinets labs in France and tested numerous Fortigate devices to see what you can actually get out of different model variants depending on usage. You can only get that throughput on SSL inspection with near enough everything else turned off. You may wish to try a different firmware revision to see if this helps (sometimes some are a little buggy). Dave

FYI we do have a wholesale deal with them and can re-sell their wireless leased lines and still go through our filtering / security. I know things have changed with them a lot since they merged. They also had a load of investment and are looking to grow a lot. Dave

Hello @snagrat. I'll check that out for you as it's news to me and I haven't heard from any other customers having that issue. Can you PM me the case refs please? Dave

Agreed. It's always best to check exactly what features are included in the package you get, particularly in regard to filtering and esafety. Also ask what happens and what monitoring does the provider actually do? E.g. is their prevent duty reporting, is there user based filtering do the firewalls do full UTM and have the licences activated. What happens when the isp has to work with the police and other law enforcement agencies. We unfortunately have had to work with law enforcement but because we have we've helped prevent loss of life and also put people behind bars. It's not something that is talked about much as to be frank some of its pretty awful. Fortunately it is rare but in thst very small percentage of schools where issues have been identified it's helped to protect children which is what we are doing and other education focused ISPs should all be doing as standard. Lots to think about over and above how fast can it go and how cheap is it

or they could just use Schools 2 schools on the DFE website for free

Hampshire for one.... They charge £1,800pa for an ADSL link to access them and point blank refuse to offer dial-in VPN access. Day light robbery....

Fundamentally don't be scared to do it. Yes plan what applications you may need to keep and how they are going to work if you leave the Local Authority if they are hosted on their WAN. The vast majority of secondary schools in the UK have already left the Local Authority provision. To my knowledge though in Bradford there are no such applications. We've over 30 schools already using our services already for the past 5-6 years with dozens more now signed up. I'd actually be surprised if Bradford LA doesn't capitulate and stop providing the service if enough schools don't sign up. I know Childrens services unfortunately has to take a massive cut in Bradford. Personally I'd rather the budget for this be spent on looking after children rather than having their own internal broadband team. FYI our business is Leeds / Bradford based. I spoke with Jo Dean (head of BLN) some months ago about the possibility of putting forward different providers (not jut us) rather than just sticking with their Virgin / YHGFL offering but unfortunately for the schools she took the easy route just to carry on with what they currently did. Shame as ourselves and the competition would save schools hundreds of thousands and year and reduce the Childrens Services budget considerably. If you want to speak to any schools that have already left the LA then do let me know as I'd be happy to put you in touch with some. I'm sure you've already got a quote from us but if not do send me a PM as we're just as competitive as everyone else and should be more so than the LA knowing how the Bradford price modelling per pupil and base line price works, particularly on the high bandwidth options. Thanks and good luck. Dave

yes I agree on the BT Dark Fibre being pulled. I think that was bad for end customers personally but I'm sure Ofcom will re-do it and it'll get pushed through next time. Ref POPs, yes you are incorrect but I won't hold it against you Dave

Kind of Mark, BT, Talk Talk etc don't yet do Dark Fibre (although they will in the not so distant future) but you can do Waves with them which we have done. We can also buy Dark Fibre circuits via Entanet for CityFibre and link that back to our POP in a location (just as you can). In fact any Entanet partner can. Entanet was of course bought by CityFibre abut 12 months ago so we now have access to exactly the same circuits as you do and can do the high speeds you've put in your post. So if anyone does want a CityFibre Dark Fibre based circuit (not layer 2) then feel to come knocking to us, Exa or another Entanet partner. You are incorrect about the GPON comment. We have GPON, layer 2 and Dark Fibre access. Dave

Just on a side note. We too have access to Cityfibres Dark Fibre network if you need a quote for Dark Fibre access or layer 2 access using Cityfibre then feel free to PM me too as it uses the same underlying technology as @exa_mark Dark Light product which is a brand name Exa has created. We've already done quite a few Cityfibre connections around the country. Although we now find that Talk Talk, Virgin, BT and Vodafone have now caught up on pricing for layer 2 services and have better coverage anyway so we generally shy away from using Cityfibre unless there's a specific reason to do so. Dave

morning @Blue_Cookeh, we've just seen this starting to happen over the last 48 hours (we are still in beta though so we do expect a few bugs). @ROB_mason is on this at the moment with Netsweeper. Watch this space we'll be in touch. Thanks Dave

yes I think you can. Thanks for pointing that out @IrritableTech as Netsweeper does support Radius. Dave

Yes @AlanD that's correct. On our transparent solution we use either an agent on each PC or captive portal which syncs back to Windows AD, Azure AD or Googleauth. There's also a chrome plugin which works a treat too. We can also do IP based filtering but that of course only identifies the device and not the user. Dave

Hi all, We've a few places left on the final beta of our new transparent filtering service and this gets rid of the issue mentioned. So no more proxy settings ever again. Feedback has been excellent so far. Do send me a PM if you'd like to go on it or be top of the list to migrate once final beta finishes in a month. Dave

works a treat. Just install the chromebook plugin Fully authenticates with google too if you use google auth. dave

Hello everyone, I can confirm what @MJTayloronline has said. Thank you Matt for Alpha testing this for us. Your feedback has been invaluable. We are very pleased to announce a WORLD FIRST! We are currently the only ISP in the world that can offer Netsweeper filtering in transparent mode AND, have the ability for multiple customers to have the same internal IP address AND and do this in a high availability Cisco load balanced environment. This means as all schools go to full 1Gbit leased lines and G.Fast (350Mbit) it will be able to cope with the huge increase in bandwidth demand we are now seeing which is generally because of the adoption of the cloud and more devices. In co-operation with Netsweeper the code to achieve this has been written specifically for us and it works and absolute treat. We have now invested over £500,000 in this new platform. We have upgraded our Netsweeper platform over the summer to one of the most recent stable releases 6.x which also incorporates a lot of new features. Many of which are now available for our existing proxy based customers but will also be available to new transparent proxy customers also. High level features people have been asking for which will be available are Transparent filtering, bye bye proxy for good Full SSL decryption / inspection IP based filtering User based filtering (Windows AD, Google auth, Azure AD) Group based filtering (Windows AD, Google auth, Azure AD) Radius integration Customisable and proactive filtering (new prevent and suicide / e-safety reports will be automatically setup for all customers) Captive portal Chrome plugin Tiered access - If you are a MAT with x number of schools you look after then network managers can have access to each school but also a master login to cover all schools. If a change of policy filtering is required then this can be pushed to all and / or some schools in the MAT making changes extremely easy to do. We will never have to change a customers internal IP address range Offsite filtering No need for IIS auth portal any longer Massively improved logging ability (it's so much easier to unblock blocked sites / applications) More need to the shared lists to work in the way they currently do The transparent and proxy solution have 100% uptime since their inception and have 10's of Gbits of capacity. The beta is now full but we expect to come out of this and will be offering this to all new customers by default. We will also be moving existing Netsweeper proxy and Lightspeed customers to the new platform over a prolonged period of time Remember, by default all of our customers can be part of a Wide Area Network and we do not charge anything extra for this. It's been a long time coming and thank you to all of our very patient customers. If you've any questions feel free to add to this thread or send me a private message. Thanks Dave P.S did I say no need for proxy settings ever? Not even in decrypting SSL?!

We've split our support team into taking inbound but part of them dedicated to calling customers who had raised a fault to ensure that this has now been resolved. The average waiting time is still only a few minutes with most calls still getting picked up straight away. Thanks Dave

Hello everyone, if you were experiencing any issues as described in the last couple of threads then these should now be resolved. We'll update those affected via the usual channels this week. For those that constantly read this thread please note it has not affected all customers, just a specific subset of Lightspeed customers. We are sorry for the inconvenience this caused. If you still have any issues please contact our support department. Alternatively I'm more than happy for you to send me a PM and I'll help get your issue resolved personally. Thanks Dave

Morning all, first my apologies for the radio silence. We've done some major upgrades to the core and Lightspeed solution over the summer all of which have been 100% successful apart from the most recent one. Some Lightspeed (not Netsweeper as this is not affected whatsoever and continues to have 100% uptime) are having intermittent issues. Following continued dialogue with Cisco and Lightspeed we have some emergency work being planned for this evening and an additional reconfiguration over the weekend which will stop these intermittent issues. We are not going to do this work during working hours as that would likely cause problems for more customers whilst the work occurred. Comms will be sent via normal channels very shortly. To confirm not all Lightspeed customers are affected and no Netsweeper customers are affected. If you need to discuss please send me a PM / email or call me on my mobile which many of you have. Thanks for your patience and I'll post an update tomorrow morning. Dave

If funding is there to improve schools broadband connections then it's great news. Following your post ive been in touch with the dmcs and their specialist schools team so thank you very much for pointing this out. Hopefully something will come of fruition from this as I do agree that all schools (And consumers and businesses) should have access to ultra fast broadband. We can help facilitate this of course and will do whatever we can. Sometimes dig costs are prohibitive which hopefully the dmcs or other government funding can help with. We have done so.e innovative stuff via dark fibre, a Wireless, sub loop unbundling to help schools and will continue to do so. Yes there's always a cost to rolling out ultrafast and super fast broadband but we always try to minimise this to as little as we can so the schools benefit from it. For example we do not charge anything extra on top of a carriers excess construction charges if they apply to an order and try to be creative with how these are paid for where we can. I do admire yours and the dmcs enthusiasm for trying to push this agend. Bravo. Dave

as soon as I'm back on holiday week after next All has been rather successful over the summer to say the least! Dave

Sure. It's Schoolsbroadband I.e us 😁 Send me a pm and I'll do you a quote. 1gbit / 1gbit is now getting to be the norm.