SchoolsBroadband

We already host a lot of them. If you'd like a quote do send me a PM. Thanks Dave

Hi. sorry I've only just noticed as I've bene out all day. Best @me / mention me in the future so I get an alert Glad to hear it's all sorted. Dave

Can you check your spam? Do you get normal updates? If not then pm me your email and Ill check. We have / will send different emails to partners than direct customers. Dave

Hi guys, can anyone tell me what Smoothwall actually include as part of their normal support contracts please? I hear lots about token based support but I've no idea what they actually include as part of the web or UTM filter licence as standard. Thanks Dave

I most certainly can. Lightspeed are dropping support of v2.x as of the end of the year so we have to upgrade our clusters to the latest version if we want the platform to continue to be supported (which we obviously do). Dave

oh and our SIP goes via a dedicated VLAN over our network into our carriers which doesn't even hit the content filtering and firewall solutions so continues to work even if other bits fail Dave

Thanks @synaesthesia for being reasonable and defending us. Perhaps we can all calm down a bit though. Yes we've had problems for SOME customers which has been down to our filtering platform but the vast majority have not. Yes we are running our Lightspeed clusters as recommended from Lightspeed from when they were installed. Yes our core network has had 100% uptime since it's inception and the only noticeable Fortigate issues we've ever had is when Fortinet told us to upgrade to a different software version to fix a memory leak which then had some bad consequences before they then created an emergency patch for the patch they told us to upgrade to (and before anyone says we did test this but the bug wouldn't appear until 2-3 days of under load of over 3Gbits per box. These issues are now about a year ago and have not appeared since. Except for an NNI issue with a carrier (as of this morning) all of our Direct Internet Access customers have never had an outage or slow speeds because of our network. We have oodles of upstream capacity. We are working on solutions to any problem we ever see on our network or suppliers kit with more to come. We really do care about our customers. It pains me every time we get a complaint or someone isn't happen because we want to give great service where people can recommend us. We are not a huge corporation making millions of pounds profit a year. We re-invest the bulk in infrastructure and employ people to look after our customers. Finally I should also say we've done a lot of great work with law enforcement agencies who have successfully caught and prosecuted offenders which have kept kids safe. If the schools would have continued to use their old content filtering solution this would likely not have happened. I do not go around bragging about this as its a very sensitive issue and the detail of it must be kept secret but what I can say is keeping kids safe is our NUMBER 1 priority and why schools use us over normal commercial ISP's. We will continue to invest and strive to improve. We are deeply sorry when we let a minority of customers down and will do everything we can to make it back up to them. Please can you we stop the back and forth (whether defending us or slating us) as we'll just continue to go round in circles with different opinions. As an when we have updates on things we are doing or any further issues then I will post information here as I did do this morning. Thanks Dave

All circuits are now coming back online. Dave

Actually Talk Talk ADSL & FTTC circuits appear not to be affected. Just Talk Talk leased lines and EoFTTC's. BT Wholesale, Virgin, Vodafone and other carriers are not affected too. Dave

Morning All, Talk talk have a major service outage affecting all leased lines, eofttc, adsl and fttc circuits over all 1gbit interconnects in telecity hex. A faulty line card has been identified and an engineer is enroute to stop out. Our 10gbit interconnects into talk talk are not affected. All dsl and fttc backups if your school has them are via BT wholesale so should function as designed. We will keep you updated. Dave

Yes we've had a certain school been ddos'd 3 times in 3 days which sits on filter 20 with over 20Gbit thrown at them each time. This is normally fixed within 5 minutes but this time filter 20 decided to crash and had to be rebooted. The school are investigating their internal systems as we're sure it's being instigated from inside their network. We've a lot going on in the background which we'll update everyone on shortly in due course. Dave

We're big Fortinet fans being a Gold MSSP. The filtering is pretty good and reporting excellent if you start to use Fortianalyzer with it too. Fortigates excel in the UTM functionality and the ASIC processors it uses for hardware acceleration and in our opinion (and Gartners) out performs the competition. We use virtualised Fortigate firewalls in the cloud one carrier grade Fortigates so you can "flex" the amount of processing power given to individual virtual firewalls. This means that if you upgrade your Internet line at a later date and need more processing power then you don't have to go out and buy a new box. We also do virutalised Fortianalyzer service too. All in for a virtualised Fortigate with UTM licence and Fortianalyzer on a dual resilient platform including engineer setup your talking £2,900pa which is pretty good when you consider a Fortigate 200E costs £5,400 for a single box year 1. We can quote for onsite boxes and professional services too of course so I'll send you a PM if its of interest. Good luck Dave

Virgin and other ISP's have had issues like that in the past. Just trawl through ISPreview.co.uk The difficult bit isn't actually in the core network, its in the ability to filter tens of gigabits of traffic in a cloud environment in particular when using in-line bridges. Still we've a lot going on behind the scenes at the moment so watch this space. Dave

We have contemplated that but for various reasons it won't really help at the moment. Thanks for the idea though Dave

Yes, despite our best efforts to inform customers to use WSUS many still don't. It's easier said that done rate limiting traffic to windows updates on an ISP scale due to where the traffic actually goes (we find not all goes via our private peering with Akamai all of the time for various reason). We're still working on this though so watch this space. On Tuesday we also saw other large patches from other vendors at roughly the same time which put further pressure on customers Internet connections. Dave

We had a very big DDoS against one of our firewalls today. This was fixed in around 10 minutes. Nothing to do with Windows updates. Thanks Dave

feel free to PM me too and I'll look into it for you also. Dave

That's very unlike us. I'll "have a word" with your account manager. PM'd, we'll have the quote with you asap. Dave

On the whole no they weren't. Dave

Hi all, we have hit record traffic levels over the last few days with Wednesday hitting over 30Gbit.. There have been some issues with Lightspeed but the biggest issue has been the huge amount of patches from different providers on the same days causing the traffic. A lot of schools have actually been maxing out their lines which hasn't helped issues. We have started to see a decline in traffic today and yesterday but we are still much higher than normal. I don't want to comment on filters at this stage but will do in the very near future. I'll get in touch with you all individually on this thread. Thanks Dave

Technical Pre - sales engineer Salary: Commensurate with experience Talk Straight / Schools Broadband is a leading telecommunications and Internet Service Provider to the business and education market in the UK. We use our own network to deliver business critical services including Cloud, Voice Services, Connectivity, Security and Content Filtering. We are currently recruiting for an enthusiastic and technically competent pre - sales engineer to help the company during a significant period of growth. * Design ICT and network solutions for our corporate, SME and education sector customers from a technical perspective * Assist account managers with technical queries from existing and potential clients * Assist account managers with solution design and pricing for existing and potential clients using the following technologies WAN / LAN / VPN / OSPF / VLAN / VPLS / MPLS / Data centre hosting / Internet / wireless / Email / Storage / Virtualisation / BT WLR3 / BT 21CN (including Microsoft Visio network diagrams, FortiAP wireless solutions etc) *Attend internal and external customer meetings and conference calls with Sales Account Managers, or on your own as required. * Work with your counterparts from our vendors and telco’s to help design and correctly specify technical solutions as per the above * Attend and present or speak at events in conjunction with the Sales Director and account management team in front of numerous potential clients demonstrating and talking about why potential customers should buy our products. These may be based anywhere in the UK. * Technically vet and investigate new technology / products to sell as part of the new customer product life cycle * Attend key vendor events to keep us one step ahead of the competition by being able to see what technology our customers should be using in the future to benefit them and our business * Help technically train and create a training program for our Schools Broadband wholesale partners and our own Internal Account Managers Training: * Comprehensive training on our new products and technology will be provided including vendor accreditation * The challenges and opportunities faced at work will contribute to learning; a large amount of the training will be on the job Knowledge and experience required: * Ideal, Cisco CCNA / CCDA, Fortinet FCNSA (or equivalent) * Desirable, Cisco CCNP / CCDP, Fortinet NSE4 *Consistent strong academic record *Team player with excellent verbal and written communication skills *Willingness to learn with a positive and professional attitude Desirable knowledge and experience: *Confident working in a customer facing role *Presentation skills *Technical design skills * commercial awareness *Any previous hands on technical experience is desirable Our passion for technology and “doing the right thing” by our customers ensures we have the best staff and the best solutions in our market place for the benefit of our customers. Benefits include holiday allowance, matched contribution pension scheme, car allowance and sales commission. If you're interested please send me a PM or email me at [email protected]

We have over 1,500 schools using carrier grade hosted Fortigate firewalls We find it's an excellent NGFW / UTM device. We also do a hosted FortiAnalzyer service too. FortiAnalyzer has come on a long way from where it was 3-4 years ago as has FortiOS on the firewalls too. The only issue we have with both products is that they can be quite complicated to manage so if you're not an experienced network manager it may not be the product for you which is why we used Lightspeed for content filtering as it's very easy to use for all levels of skills where a head teacher with no IT experience should be easily able to pull of some prevent duty reports. We're a Fortinet Gold MSSP so if you need any advice setting anything up, a quote or management then we'd be happy to help. Thanks Dave

If we already do two of your sites then yes at the moment we do VPLS setup for free. So both schools on the same Fortinet VDOM (so one firewall for two sites) and we link them together into it creating a VPLS network so both sites connect to each other privately. You don't have to do any configuration at all yourselves meaning it's easy and we do all of the management. I'd suggest starting with that and if it doesn't suffice then look at doing the point to point link. You can also monitor your current traffic usage on portal.talk-straight.com which should give you an indication of it you're starting to hit peak capacity on your lines as well as latency, jitter etc. We can do the point to point link for you too and already do this setup for some other schools. You can take the point to point link managed or unmanaged, it's completely up to you. I'll drop you a PM and get one of our technical consultants to give you a call if you like to talk you through options? Thanks Dave

So all that is left to buy from the administrators it would seem is the Sophos licences. Deals were done before ICT4C went bust for contracts to carry on with the incumbents carriers although they are pushing schools to re-sign with them or continuation of service. For any school affected we are still offering FOC service until March 31st AND free expedite install on ADSL or FTTC as a temporary measure (worth about £250) so we can get you up and running in a couple of days. So far we've had over 20 schools sign up with us and I expect quite a few more as they don't seem to like the options given by the incumbents or the pressure they've been put under. If you need an alternative quote please do send me a PM. Thanks Dave

Yes highly recommend you turn off SIP alg on your firewall as this can often break SIP