SchoolsBroadband

Fixed I believe following an MTU recalibration

Hi there, AD is currently sync'd. We will be upgrading to v6 at the start of the summer holidays and it does LDAP lookup's rather than sync which will be an improvement too. Thanks Dave

PM'd although no know speed issues on our network today. Filter 20 is being rebooted as we speak and should be back shortly. Dave

Full Fortigate is an excellent solution when also used with Fortianalyzer. Alas for most schools it's outside of their budgets which is why we don't go to the mass market with that solution. Dave

Good morning @fiza. Firstly I'm very sorry you had an outage. I'm waiting to here from our technical director on a full report but it seems as though Virgin had an issue in Telecity / Equinix data centre in London. It affected us very randomly with about 10 circuits going down out of the hundreds we have with Virgin. These were split over multiple interconnects. It definitely wasn't anything our side. You'll be sent an outage report as usual in due course. To make a claim email [email protected] and we will credit your account in line with what we are entitled to pay you. Thanks Dave

I dunno, £15k to £20kpa for a 1Gbit connection is now looking pricy....... Dave

you may all want to have a read here about peoples woes with FTTPod too! FTTPoD unreal pricing :: Fibre Broadband :: think broadband Dave

BT basically do it so they can do the same service on FTTP or G.Fast (fibre or copper). Also they don't want them to be symmetrical so it doesn't eat into their leased line market. Dave

BT are also trialling a 1Gbit download and 220Mbit upload version too! Unfortunately not at my house currently though..... Dave

We've no Virgin NNI outages, issues with Netsweeper or anything in our core. It must be a Virgin issue elsewhere. Sorry to hear you're having problems though. We'll liaise with Virgin on it. Dave

In a nutshell yes

We trialled FTTOpD a while ago and it was a nightmare!! Took ages to install compared to a leased line and in a couple of instances the ECC / install charges actually came out less to install a leased line that FTTPoD. BT Openreach did reduce and simplify the install pricing a short time ago so we may look at it again in the not so distant future. We have quite a few customers using normal BT based FTTP already and will be installing lots more as BT rolls it out to 3 million premises by 2020. My house just managed to get it too so I now have 330Mbit download and 50Mbit upload, NICE Picture of what BT Openreach actually install in your property is below. Note the box on the left is the Openreach modem which is also a VoIP ATA and the box on the right is a UPS to power the ATA in case of a power failure at the property and someone needs to make a 999 emergency call. Thanks Dave

Good morning everyone, for the avoidance of doubt please see a G.Fast capable address we used in the BT checker https://www.dslchecker.bt.com/adsl/ADSLChecker.AddressOutput If it doesn't say G.Fast on the left under the featured products column then BT don't yet support G.Fast on that line (even though your cabinet may have one of the new pods). So if it does then please get in touch and we'll see if we ca get you on the trail. Thanks Dave

Hello this is for existing and potential customers. i.e. anyone

Anyone so long as it's installed at a school

Hello everyone, we're always trying the very latest and greatest here at Schools Broadband and next up from a connectivity point of view is G.fast. For those of you that haven't heard of G.Fast (BT retail call it Ultrafast), it's going to be a replacement for FTTC (BT retail call this Superfast). BT Openreach are current upgrading lots of their street cabinets with new G.Fast pods on them. A picture of them can be found below (its the thin one on the right added to the normal phone line cabinet). G.fast will initially be available in two variants. 160Mbit down, 30Mbit up and 350Mbit down and 50Mbit up which is quite a bit quicker than FTTC and the majority of leased lines many schools have. Just like FTTC, G.Fast is copper based so the signal degrades over distance from the cabinet so the speed will get slower the further you are away. We will also be offering EoG.Fast (Ethernet Over G.Fast) which will come with guaranteed speeds and an enhanced SLA just as we do with EoFTTC. If you're lucky enough to be able to get it (check on the link below) then please do get in touch as we will be offering it free of charge to a couple of customers for a year to see how it performs and test the installation process. https://www.dslchecker.bt.com/adsl/ADSLChecker.AddressOutput It's currently only available to about 360,000 premises but BT will be rolling it out in earnest from the summer I believe. Thanks as always Dave

Hi @synaesthesia, we upgraded filter 9 only as a first test to migrate the other filters to v3. Comms will have gone out to everyone we have down as being on that filter. Some changes have been made from Lightspeed which now allow us to move to v3 which is good so this was the first test one which on the whole went well. Feedback as always is appreciated if you could send those into the support teams too please. Dave

Hello everyone, I'd appreciate some constructive feedback from the community around carrier interconnect / data centre resiliency. Currently, most leased lines and GEA / EoFTTC based connections terminate on a designated NNI / interconnect from the carrier into one of our data centres on a dedicated piece of fibre. If that NNI / interconnect fails then unless the customer has a backup line using another access technology e.g. ADSL or 4G then the leased line will go offline until the carrier fixes their interconnect. It's rare this issue happens but it has in the past and I'm sure at some point will do again in the future no matter which underlying carrier is used. We have multiple NNI's / interconnects to most carriers spanning numerous data centres . A shadow VLAN allows us to create another VLAN / backup data path which terminates on a different NNI / interconnect / physical piece of fibre. This can be in the same data centre of a different one. The advantage is that if a carrier NNI or the line card terminating the NNI on one of our Cisco routers fails then all traffic can automatically be re-routed to a different NNI / interconnect. Traditionally this has cost us about £500 to setup and with an ongoing rental so whichever customers we've approached about using it haven't been interested due to school budget pressures. However, I've just been informed that the costs have been significantly reduced and I expect we could offer this for about £20pm with free setup per circuit. So to be clear this removes the below as single points of failure NNI / Interconnect failure Core Line card / router failure I would love to be able to offer this FOC and bundle it into our leased line offerings but I suspect it wouldn't be appreciated by the masses and would just make our leased lines look more expensive that our competitors who don't. I'd love to know your thoughts (particularly if you're a MAT using cloud based services) on if you'd see value in this or not. Thanks Dave

Hi Steve, although we've had a few problems with our hosted Lightspeed service in the past our core network is 100% for the last 3 years so customers with their own onsite boxes haven't had any issues unless its been down to a specific circuit or carrier fault. Thank you for considering us. Dave

Thanks for the praise to our tech team I'll make sure I feed it back. I wish we could automate moving config from Lightspeed to Netsweeper. If we could then we would but Lightspeed is a closed system and we've no access to databases and config files on the Rockets unfortunately. I'll get back to you on the BYOD authentication as I know its very close depending on which iteration you are using of course. Dave

Hi @johnpd. Fortigate firewalls are available as standard on 95% of our product range. You can use Fortigate Wi-Fi access points on our hosted firewalls if you want to. Best check the model and firmware versions with our technical consultants first but we already have hundreds of APs attached to our hosted firewalls already. Dave

It'll go as quick as the routing allows via our peers which will be a minimum of 10gbit. The big Fortigates have excellent ipsec throughput Dave

To increase reliability into Azure we could install a Microsoft Expressroute for your trust as this gives an sla and guaranteed bandwidth into Microsoft too from our network over and above peering and ipsec vpns. Also as it's a Trust are all the schools not in the same virtualised Fortigate firewall? That would make ipsec vpn set up and expressroute setup much more simple. Dave

Pm-d .. .

It's on its way. We've specifically asked Netsweeper to develop this for us. It should eventually be in Netsweepers standard build and available for other providers to use as well. Dave