SchoolsBroadband

Hi everyone, I've done a lot of chatting to people on this including the administrators, Vapour Media (wholesale connectivity provider outside of Kirklees for ICT4C), a number of other IT companies and schools. It would appear that Kirklees are going to leave the lights on for schools for a reasonable amount of time so schools can decide what they want to do (move to another provider or contract direct with Kirklees / YHGF). Vapour are wanting all schools to re-sign as quickly as they can as they've essentially been left with a bill to continue to leave the lights on as they were not paid upfront a year in advance for services as ICT4C were from each school. So they're wanting all schools to re-sign with them for 3 years to allow them to continue service until the end of March. I have another call with the administrators on Monday booked in so can update people as of then further. We have also offered FOC Internet and filtering service for schools until the end of March so they don't have to pay for their Internet connectivity twice. This is available direct or via our IT support partners who we can put you in touch with if you wish to take a full IT support and broadband package. We are also paying for expedite installs on ADSL, FTTC, EoFTTC and leased lines so we can get replacement services in quick. We've already some FTTC installs booked in for Tuesday this coming week so we can do a really quick turnaround where necessary. Feel free to send me a PM if I can help at all. Thanks Dave

It's been a while since I used MDM on ipads but wasn't it a feature of IOS that profiles could be removed by anyone? i.e. you couldn't lock it down so profiles couldn't be removed? Dave

One time one of our major competitors blocked our main website on their filtering system so their schools couldn't look at alternate suppliers saying it was classed as "proxy avoidance / hacking". An honest mistake they claimed, cough splutter Dave

It's all back to Ofcom to re-do some of the wording and definitions which the CAT deemed to be unworkable and anti competitive. Personally I can't wait to see Dark Fibre available throughout the UK from BT. I did chuckle to myself that BT, City Fibre and Virgin Media all opposed the Ofcom ruling. My view is that BT did it to protect their own margin and other fibre providers didn't want it as it'd get rid of their USP's or erode their own margin putting severe pressures on their business models. Still that's business so for the mean time Dark Fibre is still more of a niche product but it'll be mainstream relatively soon I still think. Until then we still offer it where available as well as high capacity Waves and Ethernet. Dave

it will at some point happen. The competition authority just upheld a complaint by BT Openreach against Ofcom to not force BT Openreach to offer their own Dark Fibre product to other communication providers. This would have given a similar service to Cityfibre available nationwide. Not Ofcoms fault per say for once. Still i'm confident this will still happen in the next 12-18 months so watch this space Dave

Hello everyone, just to let you all know Schools Broadband (and other ISP's if they've the agreements in place) are able to offer access to Cityfibres high speed Ethernet and GPON services to the majority of their connected cities throughout the UK. Costs for high speed bandwidth (500Mbit and 1Gbit options in particular) generally wipe the floor with Virgin Media and BT Openreach based circuits so we can be extremely competitive if you're lucky enough to be on net and in one of their connected cities. These services are same speed upload and download and come with guaranteed SLA's. Installation for Fibre Ethernet is FOC is you're 75m or under from their existing ducting and lead time 45 working days. We can also backhaul their connectivity into our cloud based filtering and security platform just as we can any other carrier in the UK so sites can also be easily added to a MPLS or VPLS WAN with other connectivity providers. So if you're looking to take advantage of cloud based applications which Google, Microsoft and other large content providers offer and want near wire speed connectivity as if the services were hosted onsite then its really now very affordable to do so. Cities initially available are Edingburgh Leeds Northampton Milton Keynes Bristol Reading Bracknell Slough Maidenhead Leicester Nottingham Sheffield Aberdeen Huddersfield Coventry with more cities coming online in the next 6 months or so. So if you want the fastest connections available at the best prices on the market then let us (or another Cityfibre partner) know and we'd be happy to give you a quick quote.. Thanks Dave

I wonder how much money we'd make if we put this on all the blocked pages we served up from our filtering service Only joking of course we'd never do it but it'd be interesting to calculate just how much coin / money it'd make......

Get them to check the CPU isn't maxing out. The RB2011's sometimes struggle under high load when using SIP firewall rules. The RB3011 is a beefed up version of the RB2011. Alternatively come back to us and we'll have it fixed in a jiffy Dave

@mrbios are we still your broadband provider? It could be that by putting QOS on the Mikrotik and when you see high traffic and session count that the memory or CPU is getting maxed out on the Mikrotik router. This can cause some packet loss which could then be why you're seeing poor call quality. So get the ISP (or us) to logon to the Mikrotik when you're seeing these problems and see what the CPU and memory usage is. If its 100% then time for a more powerful Mikrotik which will fix the issue. Send me a PM if we are your broadband provider still and I'll help look into it personally for you. Thanks Dave

The Mikrotiks are excellent routers and very powerful for the cost. However they are quite complicated to configure and if you don't know what you're doing you'll get frustrated with them quite quickly. Persevere though and you can get a lot out of them. Thanks Dave

+1 for Fortigate here. Fortinet are the world's 3rd biggest firewall/UTM vendor and you get a lot of bang for your buck as they have dedicated asic chipsets and content processors to move processing from the standard cpus. We use big virtualised 1000 and 3000 series in our core. They're excellent pieces of kit. Dave

I used SIPgate a long time ago and that seemed to be relatively easy to use

4g is a good bet but then you often don't get real world up addresses with them which can be a pain. Alternatively adsl can be bought on a 30 day contract from a few isps and if an analogue line already exists that you can install it on then the isp can pay bt for an expedite install. This is best efforts but we've had adsl and fttc installed within 48 hours in the past. Dave

I've met the CEO of Adept Telecom (Ian Fishwick) and quite like the guy. Calls a spade a spade Dave

I read yesterday that Atomwide has been sold to Adept Telecom. I've met the owner of Adept a few times at various industry events. He's a very clued on guy so should be interesting to see what they do with Atomwide and all the schools they look after

Gamma really were pioneers in SIP trunking and hosted VoIP brining a stable solution to the mass market. Dave

Hi @ChrisERoots, we can provide a SIP channel in a matter of minutes whether on-net or off-net from our network. We can either terminate a SIP trunk onto your existing PBX (if compatible) or onto a VoIP gateway similar to BT depending on your setup. Do send me a PM and I'll give you a call straight away if you like? Thanks Dave

You can tie FortiClient into FortiEMS (virtualised central management) or Fortigate (firewall). We will offer both versions. As soon as it's ready I'll let you know but shouldn't be long now. If anyone wishes to beta test for us then please send me a PM. Thanks Dave

We can sell you FortiMail but don't directly support it at the moment as we haven't had the call for it. If you wish to purchase it via us though then we'd be happy to pass on a quote for any requirements and I suspect we'd give you a decent discount too as personally I'd be interested to get feedback on the product from an end customer. PM me if you'd like me to do that for you. Thanks Dave

Dave

my apologies I missed the first bit. I know it was a common complaint for many secondary schools that they couldn't manage their own UTM / firewall. I've nothing in particular against LGFL and have met the new CEO a few times who I prefer to the last. Dave

so you can't open ports or change security settings yourself????

hi @nathan, unfortunately the Competition Appeals Tribunal has halted Ofcoms ruling to force BT openreach into launching a Dark Fibre product. City Fibre, Virgin media and other altnets will be breathing a big sigh of relief. UPD BT Stall Ofcom Dark Fibre and 2016 Business Connectivity Review Changes - ISPreview UK personally I think its a real shame the CAT have got in the way of revolutionising Internet connectivity across the UK. My sources tell me this will probably push things back 6 - 9 months so in reality that'll mean UK wide Dark Fibre from BT in September 2018. lets wait and see what happens and I'll keep you all updated. Dave

You need to log traffic against a policy and then ideally output that to a logging service. FortiAnalyzer is the ideal one. A Fortigate firewall on its own comes with limited reporting. FortiAnalyzer gives a huge amount of logging and reporting capabilities. It sounds as though you maybe using us. Suggest you contact your account manager and one of our technical consultants to help you here. Alternatively send me a PM and I'll see what I can do to help. Having said that we don't use Fortigate 1000C's so maybe it is someone else Dave

That's kind of right Mark although the average length of an EAD LA circuit (what DFA will replace) is only 1.8km. 99% of all carriers will go back to the local BT Exchange and use a DFA LA based circuit which will cost less than a normal DFA between a couple of data centres. Also most carriers will amortise the install cost over the contract term so it will be £0 install for everyone. Furthermore, DFA can be run at any speed and isn't limited to 1Gbit. It can be run at 10Gbit, 40Gbit, 100Gbit its all down to what optics you put on the end of it as its just a piece of fibre. Finally and most importantly in my opinion, both DFA and EAD products are based on BT fibre. BT fibre is installed in a huge amount of locations (and I don't mean outside the front door with digging required, I mean already terminated in the building) so there are generally no ECC charges and we've had installs completed in 2 weeks. YES 2 WEEKS FOR A LEASED LINE INSTALL!!!! This is thanks to BT's quick win policy where they now use a multi-skilled engineer to perform an install rather than different engineers from different departments. Using PIA or digging fibre from other carriers in to a site takes such a long time. We've a school in Leeds that decided to leave to use another cheaper carrier. After nearly 18 months they are still using us as although the other carrier / ISP said it'd take 3 months they are still waiting. I'm all for competition and using other carriers to be creative and get good pricing but there are downsides to doing so too. Dave