SchoolsBroadband

Hi @fiza, i'm sure we can. Can you PM me the case ID please and I'll pass onto our support manager for you if you've not escalated it already. Thanks Dave

Hello, We are not expecting existing customers to make any changes to their setup unless they wish to take advantage of the new features available which can be done immediately or at a time convenient to you. We'll give you plenty of notice as per our maintenance notification windows we give on service upgrades. Watch out for official comms via email as usual. Thanks Dave

We had considered this but it doesn't work in the way we need in our environment. Thanks Dave

All i can say at the moment guys is that we are working very closely with Netsweeper on what will be a world first. We've lots of new things working in the lab which need to be rolled out into our production environment and heavily tested before being released to our customers. Some of the new features will work and some of them may not once tested in earnest. We don't want to rush the new features out without extensive testing so we can ensure stability is going to keep the 100% uptime and high throughput speeds we already have with the new platform which is the reason we've invested so much into it. I expect us to make an official announcement around the start of the summer holidays so watch this space Dave

Hi there, We've full integration into Google auth being rolled out in netsweeper v6.1 which is happening in the next couple of months plus ntlm over ldap too so no more manual AD sync. Lots more to come also so don't jump ship yet Dave

oh and Netsweeper is a country mile better than where it was in the old RBC days. We're currently on the latest stable release of v5 and about to go to v6. With v6 we have full integration into Google Auth which is one big thing our customers want going forward. We've had it working in the lab and will be deploying this very shortly. Thanks Dave

We've a lot of work going on at the moment and we'll have some more official communication soon so watch this space for some more positive news FYI did I say we've had 100% uptime on the new Netsweeper platform since its inception ?! Dave

Hi Thomas, thanks for considering us. As per the forum we've had some issues in the past but not for sometime. Our new Netsweeper platform has had 100% uptime since it's inception in September, our Cisco core network has been 100% for years and the Fortigate firewall has been 100% for about 18 months I think. Our VPLS WAN's are included as standard too so if you become part of a MAT then there's no additional charge to managed a WAN for you. This is included as part of whatever connectivity you take from us. We've also got a lot of new features coming which are cloud based and you get FOC upgrades to these as and when they are ready. if you've any questions do feel free to send me a PM. We're currently serving over 1,500 schools with many more joining each week. Thanks again Dave

Thanks for considering us @Strawdog Bigger bandwidths have come tumbling down of late in price so you may want to consider some bigger lines rather than just a couple of 100Mbits load balanced. As aways I'm more than happy to answer any questions you may have around our service and I've sent you a PM. We can also help migrate your Lightspeed rules to our Netsweeper platform as we've been doing this for a number of our existing customers from our old platform (Lightspeed) to our new platform (Netsweeper). Thanks Dave

hi Stuart, whats your case reference number please if you can PM that to me? We should be able to see where all the data is going to (i.e. a content delivery network) and then put some QOS rules to protect these you from these destinations in some form. Thanks Dave

PM'd it is quite different from our old Lightspeed solution but can still be done. It just takes a while to get used to it.

That's correct. Many people don't actually use the voice element of a phone line anymore and just use them for broadband so BT will eventually just bring out a copper based product purely for broadband. If my memory serves me correctly I think the BT product us known as SoGEA. Dave

We do all of the above and even some 10Gbit Ethernet, Waves and Dark fibre as part of a WAN PM sent. Thanks Dave

We're looking into it. Might be a suspected DDoS against a specific filter from internal to external rather than the other way around. Other cluster filters were not impacted. Dave

hi @sister_annex Let me know with our product manager Rob (he designed the system with Netsweeper) as to why we've done it once a day. I'm sure it will be having thousands of schools syncing constantly wouldn't be good for the platform. Rob is on holiday today but back Monday so I'll be in touch then with a full answer for you. Thanks Dave

Hi Stuart, currently on the latest v5 of Netsweeper AD syncs once a day. I believe this is around 5 o'clock (@RobMason please confirm). We will be upgrading to v6 in the summer which does direct lookups via LDAP rather than a directory sync. You / We can run a trace to see what each user attempts to connect to. The support guys can help you with this as we can see what's been blocked and unblock it if required. If you get stuck do let me know and I'll escalate for you. Thanks Dave

Yep. We've a few large MATs that do this rather than use our hosted solution as they are big smoothwall fans. Each to their own but it works a treat and has no problems integrating to our WANs Dave

Hi @mavhc yes we can do this in the cloud with our hosted Fortigate and Netsweeper solution. No need for different licences and or multiple boxes as its all virtualised in our data centres. all done with HA / load balanced failover too for resilience. It's currently on 100% uptime since its inception 7 months ago too. Thanks Dave

Likewise we can do all Virgin Media leased lines as we have direct interconnects to them. I have heard from others that Virgin aren't the easiest to work with direct. Dave

we certainly shouldn't be as we get customers to use that to help test issues. It may just be on your individual setup and a category is blocked for some reason. The support guys can help you get this unblocked of course or you can allow it. Thanks Dave

Hi @Andy_Cap, i'll send you a PM shortly. Firstly I'm sorry you haven't been happy and have moved away. This is of course your choice which I respect. Let me please respond to some of your specific points as many people do read these threads. Annual contracts - We have always charged annual in advance for our contracts. The main reason for this is that our UTM and web filtering licences we buy are on a minimum 3 year term with an annual 1 year extension. We can't buy these licences monthly. From some of our carriers to get the best prices we also have to pay annually in advance. In the Education sector annual contracts are the norm. Yes some ISP's do monthly or quarterly contracts on connectivity only but then they don't always do the other bundled services. Even if you went a day over your contract we'd still have to buy another 12 months UTM and web filtering licence so we have to hold our clients to an annual renewal as we are held with our suppliers. Ref Service credits - I will PM you. If you are owed service credits then we will give you these back. It's not the norm for ISP's to give any service credits and I know we go over and above the industry average as other education ISPs do not give any and only have "target SLA's" rather than true binding SLA"s with penalties for failure. Equipment return - Unlike some ISP's we do not charge you for the equipment up front. We effectively lend this to our customers over the period of the term. The routers still do have value and we do sometimes re-use them. if not we have to dispose of them correctly. We don't think it's too much asking you to pop it back to us in the post and this is clearly defined in our terms and conditions everyone signs up to. We don't charge to ship to to you either. PM to come to you shortly. Thanks Dave

We don't have a definitive date for migrations yet. We've a lot of customers that have moved and are liking the new Netsweeper platform. It works quite differently to Lightspeed but we've quite a few developments we're working on to make migrations easier so watch this space. The new Netsweeper platform also has 100% uptime which was one of the reasons we developed and invested in a new scalable & resilient platform to cope with new bandwidths which are being imminently released by BT and other carriers (G.Fast for example). Dave

Hi folks. Yes v6 was a bit too "green" when we went into production so we stuck with v5.3 You are correct though v6 is happening in the summer which you'll all get for free. Dave

Unfortunately i dont think vouchers can be used for schools

Is DNS taking a long time to respond? Dave