SchoolsBroadband

We now offer Netomnia connections (Youfibre are their end user ISP, Netomnia is wholesale only). This includes our anti-ddos, hosted firewalling and filtering token if that's what you need as well as static IPs etc too. I believe we're currently the only education ISP who partner with Netomnia nationally. We offer their fttp, eofttp and ethernet connections. If it's of interest to anyone do let me know. Thanks Dave

Do you have pur free telemetry service on the hub which monitors your historic bandwidth usage? Oue team can also log onto your router to see what speed you're doing at the exact second. I'd also recommend checking your switch to see what negotiation speed it's set itself too. A speed of 95 does sound a touch suspiciously close to 100mbps. If you dm me the case id I'll take a look too. We've no known network issues atm. Thanks Dave

Not at all Tom. The largest support costs to us is the management and operational costs of the filtering platform by far compared to the pure shifting of data. Shifting of data is relatively easy in comparison. Dave

it's true @Primus is our biggest fan

Hi @JonnyAlpha, we can do filtering, connectivity and monitoring as we now partner with Smoothwall for the monitoring element. You can also have your own virtual cloud hosted firewall if you want. We also support the use of Starlink too even if you procure that directly with them and you can use all of our services still. Different providers have their different pro's and conn's. Some people like us on here, some people don't but we've now around 3,000 schools using our service in England which I'm sure speaks volumes. If you let me know your postcode I can check Openreach rollout plans for FTTP or other altnets too so you've a full choice available to you. Feel free to DM me. Cheers Dave

Hello everyone, i'm pleased to announce that we've bought E2BN Protex who are a trading subsidiary of E2BN. E2BN Protex holds all remaining broadband contracts from the original East Of England Broadband Network (E2BN Ltd). E2BN will no longer sell broadband and / or filtering services in any form but will continue with their Everything ICT Framework and other services supporting education. Please see https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/08/education-focused-uk-isp-talk-straight-acquires-internet4schools.html https://www.schoolsbroadband.co.uk/talk-straight-limited-acquires-e2bn-protex-ltd/ and https://www.e2bn.org/cms/blog/internet4schools-joins-talk-straight-group I'm very pleased to add E2BN Protex and its staff to Talk Straight Groups family of companies. Thanks Dave

We do this as standard for all our customers and partner with a large number of carriers for best price / performance. You don't have to take our webfilter option if you don't want to. We can give you a resilient hosted virtual firewall or an onsite SD-WAN / firewall where each site can have a central management service as well. We look after a high percentage of the largest MATs in the country using this solution. See http://www.schoolsbroadband.co.uk

FortiAnalyzer is great and in my opinion better than Fastvue although more expensive

Yes, Fortigate is fine for deploying in educational environments and the filtering is good. However there is no in built reporting so you also need to add in a reporting engine. Paid for services are FortiAnalyzer and Fastvue. However, our Incident Management Platform takes e portrs filtering logs from FortiGate and gives enhanced web filtering reports. This is FOC for anyone taking our hosted and virtualised FortiGate solution when bolted on to our connectivity. You have access to your own dedicated virtual firewall and have the same access as you would do with a device on site, only our very big firewalls scale much better. The only thing to be aware of is that currently FortiGate without additional bolt-ons does not correctly support logging on and off correctly with Azure / Entra ID without additional payable FortiAuthenticator which is very expensive for most schools. We are though working with them on that and also creating our own solution to overcome it. On site AD is absolutely fine though. Do send me a PM if you'd like any more information. Thanks Dave

You can already get the full Fortigate filtering stack from us on your own Fortigate Virtual firewall. No need to buy a new box. I'll PM you shortly. Thanks Dave

The issue should now have been resolved around 15 mins ago. Please check the hub for further updates. Thanks Dave

There's been a failure on one of the Netsweeper inline servers we have. Comms about to go out and will be on our hub as usual. I can't say much more than that at the moment thanks Dave

No general speed issues atm. I've sent you a pm

can you look at any live bandwidth stats? e.g. RM log onto your router and see what IP's are using up your bandwidth? Alternatively can you do this from your layer 3 switch (assuming you have one)? Dave

Updates are on status 1061 on the hub portal. Having briefly spoken to the NOC team they're investigating a Netsweeper policy server issue. I don't have anything more than that I'm afraid at the moment other than its a P1 priority so our NOC engineers are on it. Thanks Dave

BT Openreach doesn't have a Dark Fibre service wholesale other than connecting exchanges together. You can take Optical Waves rather than a layer 2 EAD but expect big bucks for that. Some other networks such as Virgin and Cityfibre do offer Dark fibre circuits but only where they're already on net at both ends. Dark fibre isn't something we're often accessed for but we can do. I'll send you a PM as it'd normally have to go through a specialist team here. We can also use 3rd parties to offer a PIA solution using BT's ducts over 6.5km, Again though expect a meaty price to do that. I'd estimate at least £35k for a brand new build to install, then there's PIA rental fee's and also fee's if it breaks. Is there a reason why you want Dark Fibre over say a 10Gbps point to point EAD type solution? Thanks Dave

Being some what biased I'd recommend our own hosted FortiGate platform where you get your own virtual iced FortiGate which can also be in a HA pair. We can give you carrier diversity using BT for one connection and Virgin for another inc auto fail over. You can then add on our hosted FortiAnaylzer for advanced analytics and we'll also include our our safety incident management platform which takes FortiGate real-time logs and presents all esafety breaches and possible breaches back to you and you Digital safeguarding lead in an easy to use interface. Using hosted FortiGate means no big capital costs for hardware, just an annual amount. I'm sure we would beat BTs and Virgin pricing direct and with our value add services on top it should be quite compelling, particularly for big bamdwidths. Finally, we also partner with a lot of Altnets and have some very special pricing with some of the. On speeds of 2Gbps a d above so if they're available then you could get even better value and / or faster speeds. Do PM me if interested. We've a lot of large MATs paint this solution with speeds of 10gbps to each secondary school Thanks Dave

Go with FortiGate from Fortinet. You won't be disappointed, particular in conjunction with FortiAnalyzer. They can do very big bandwidths with a lot of power features. We can also get you logs exported into our Incident management portal for safe guarding of students. Pm me if you'd like a quote of more info as we're an official MSSP partner of Fortinet. Thanks Dave

It all depends how much you turn on and how many policies you have. We've some large MATs using 10GB a day with circa 50 schools in them so 5GB i suspect would be enough. You can start at 5GB and add more as you go though which is what i'd suggest. Thanks Dave

Issue with a crashed NS Proxy which had to be manually restarted on a policy server which controls policy for 4 inline's. Now fixed as per your comments. Different customers saw different effects to their traffic depending on the status of their inline, that's beyond my technical knowledge to delve further though at this point. RFO will be delivered by the usual channels. Thanks Dave

It was a routing issue from a CDN. We worked with them and also Purple Mash (an education application hosted on AWS) that initially highlighted the issue to us and fixed it a few hours ago. Thanks for your patience. Dave

Morning folks. Sorry for the late reply. I have been out of the office most of the week. Ref issues to some DFE sites and the Purple Mash issue on the status portal we believe there is an issue with content delivery network related to Amazon. We have worked closely with Purple Mash engineers and execs who use Amazon to host their services. They are investigating with Amazon as to what the underlying issue is. We don't think it's a geo ip locator issue as it's happening from various different net blocks we have when trying to access some Amazon hosted AWS services. To be clear we are not blocking nor have any routing issues to Amazon and do a heck of a lot of traffic to them. We are trying to contact Amazon also to help them resolve what we believe is their issue as is Purple Mash. The status portal will be updated shortly adding to my comment. Ref Microsoft. We are aware of a completely different issue and are working to resolve this. An update will appear on this soon. No connectivity should be completely down. If this is the case with your individual school please call the help desk as per usual. We'll keep you updated via the portal. Thanks David

From our experience firewall vendors publish the theoretical max if the wind blows in the right direction. If you truly want to know what you can get out of a firewall you need to test with the config you're going to use in a dev environment. I appreciate this is very difficult for a school to do and also to mimic the real world throughput of a school. We travel to France to Fortinets testing labs where they a number of Ixia boxes which can mimic specific throughput scenario's. Very useful when you're paying £250k for a firewall and you want to know exactly what it can and can't do. See https://www.keysight.com/us/en/products/network-test/performance-monitoring.html Fortinet also have a device called FortiTester which is pretty cool. Fortinet publish their throughputs on https://www.fortinet.com/content/dam/fortinet/assets/data-sheets/Fortinet_Product_Matrix.pdf To maximise the use of what you've got you may want to trust certain traffic policies and reduce what protection you use . Ultimately its down to budget but i do understand why a lot of vendors will struggle with 10Gbps services. This is going to be more commonplace as time goes on, particulary with the advent of XGS-PON FTTP services which are very cost effective. Firewall vendors will catch up as new chipsets become available with power processing power. The new G series chipset FortiGate have just released is pretty damn good, particulary for IPSEC VPN which I believe is the transport layer it uses for SD-WAN. As Fortinet develop and create their own ASIC chipsets this is generally where they have an advantage over other firewall vendors when you want to go very fast compared to vendors that generally use CPU's that go into normal computers. Dave

We're currently investigating some very high amounts of traffic via a specific peering route which is out of the ordinary. Update shortly on the hub. That's all I have at the moment whilst the NOC team are investigating. Thanks Dave

All fixed. I'll let others answer your question on what they think about the Incident Management Platform. Dave