SchoolsBroadband

Hi @ryanplym, there's very little difference between a hosted and onsite Lightspeed Rocket. Suggest you have a chat with our Technical Consultant Luke so he can explain the differences in full. Your account manager can arrange that call. We can supply onsite Rockets too of course. Are you just looking to lease the capital cost of the Rocket box? Any finance company can do that for you. We are actually looking into doing more leasing at the moment so if you send me a PM I can see if we can organise this for you. Thanks Dave

it depends how long you think it'll be before you upgrade. You can normally upgrade bearer mid contract term for a one off install fee. If you upgrade in say 18 months time into a 36 month contract then this could be more cost effective that paying the higher rental price from day 1. Dave

Odd. It should do. Pm'd

We have a mailing list for all customers so someone at your school will be getting this. if you want to be added to the mailing list then just email [email protected] and ask to be added and they'll do it for you. Cheers Dave

We do put messages on our support number. This is done straight away if we have a major service incident. It can take time to diagnose a DDoS depending on if its volumetric or application specific. These incidents require investigation so it'd be wrong and impossible for us to immediately say "we are being DDoS'd" before we know the cause of the issue. Our process is to put a message onto the phone system saying we have an issue which is effecting xyz, send an email to all customers saying we are investigating the issue, update all customers by email at a specific time interval (if the issue takes a long time to fix), provide a brief summary to confirm issue has been resolved and then a full report is sent to everyone within x number of days specifying what the issue was, how we resolved it and what if anything we can do in the future to mitigate the issue. The above isn't for a DDoS but for any major service incident. We follow ITIL processes where we can. Thanks Dave

Have you thought of putting sip on a separate broadband line e.g fttc and a big standard firewall? You may also want to look at end to end qos to guarantee call quality. We do all of that as standard so let me know if of interest. Thanks a good luck. Dave

Hi @FN-GM, we've lots of different ways as to how we can catch DDoS instigators. However I don't want to publicise them as I know pupils read this forum. Quite happy to have a chat or send me a PM if I can help give you ideas to combat them yourselves? Thanks Dave

Hello everyone, We actually get ddos'd near enough every week and most of the time we soak them up without anyone noticing. The one that hit us today appears to be very very big. I don't have precise details yet as I'm out of the country on annual leave but back to work on Monday to will update you all then once I've spoke. With the relevant people. We have actually caught pupils instigating ddos attacks before against there own school. This is actually more common than you'd imagine and have had relevant law enforcement used when required. I can't go into specifics or individual cases of course. Ref filter 5. We had a total hardware failure and this was resolved last night. Thanks Dave

FAZ is great in v5.4 and above. Which version are you using? Dave

With respect its not free, they just bundle it with the cost of the rest of the services which are consistently more than other education based ISP's.......

Hello everyone, we will shortly be launching a new SIP product to replace traditional ISDN services which incorporates network level end to end QOS, guaranteed call quality and SLA for all on net customers. The product will be available to on net and off net customers. I'm looking for a couple of existing customers and one off-net (non current customer) to beta test the service for us. The trial will give you completely free SIP trunk rental for 12 months, reduced call packages and a free VoIP gateway if you can't terminate the trunk on your own PBX. If this is of interest to anyone please do send me a PM. Thanks! Dave

Hi @synaesthesia, UK based Dark Fibre (not just in City Fibres network area) is just around the corner and we will be beta testing BT Openreach's offering very shortly as we are a select number of ISP's being specifically chosen by our carrier partner to do this. FYI 200Mbit using Virgin Media Fibre (no filtering or firewalling) is very doable for under £6k pa. We've also a special offer on from Virgin until the end of May where we can do a full 1Gbit for under £10k pa nationwide on Virgins network (without firewalling and filtering). All pricing uncontended with guaranteed speeds. Thanks for the mention Dave

It depends what you get as part of your assured broadband service and if you've had any issues with your current internet connection from your ISP. Have a think what would happen if your broadband connection was DDOS'd? I don't know which ISP you're referring to but if a line is DDOS'd and firewalling etc is done onsite rather than in the cloud then you will find that VoIP probably won't work. Assured broadband services can mitigate it to an extent. e.g. we are looking to offer our own Assured broadband where VoIP effectively doesn't even touch the Internet so less points of failure and less things to go wrong. It gives you assurances that it will work and gives you an SLA around it too. Most of the time a normal Internet connection is absolutely fine so long as you have some kind of QOS on your firewall BUT there can still be instances where you can have issues. Personally I've sold and installed hosted VoIP and SIP trunking for 10 years so well versed with what can go wrong and there are all sorts of things that you wouldn't normally think of. If BT sold ISDN lines saying "they'll probably work most of the time" then they'd be a laughing stock. if your school or business relies on the telephone (and most will) ask yourself what would happen if they didn't work for 2 minutes, 5 minutes, an hour? a day?? if the answer is it doesn't matter then sure go for VoIP over a normal shared broadband connection. If you want guaranteed call quality an SLA around uptime, bandwidth available for SIP channels , jitter and latency then go assured or ensure your ISP can do some kind of network level QOS if its for their own service. If you're using a VOIP service on the general Internet then there's probably no point having an assured line as the ISP can only assure things up to their network edge. Thanks and good luck. Dave

Hi @nicholab, We'd be happy to provide you with a quote too. We look after about 1500 schools internet, filtering and security needs across the country and look after quite a few schools in Birmingham as well as having a number of partners based nearby too. I'll send you a pm. Thanks Dave

In that case all you need to do is to find out a spare IP address you can use from BT and change the MX record from the old Ip to the new one + setup and port forwarding or other firewalling rules required. Dave

Where is the mail server? Or were you using your old ISP's? Dave

Hi again, is this a primary school on a shared VDOM or your own dedicated VDOM? If its for your secondary school then you will have access to this, if a primary it depends on what they purchased. Can you send me over a PM with the case reference and I'll speak with the engineer on the case. Thanks D ave

Hi @synaesthesia, why not use app control on the Fortigate firewall? That should do the trick See http://docs.fortinet.com/uploaded/files/1656/controlling-network-access-using-application-control.pdf Thanks Dave

Well we put everyone in a MAT into a MPLS WAN with a centralised firewall so remote users can remote dial-in VPN or sites "off-net" can create a static IPSEC tunnel back to the centralised firewall from their connection extending the LAN.

it has to be a physically separate analogue line from a PBX.

Hi @tj2419, one of customer inadvertently DDoS'd a radius server on one of our filters which caused a process on that filter to crash. The Lightspeed Rocket automatically re-started the process so that's why the auth was intermittent but it couldn't handle all the thousands of requests it was getting. It was certainly a very odd issue and one we'd never seen before and could only occur in a very specific circumstance. Customers on all other filters were not affected. As you said Internet access still worked on this filter so no proper outage as such. Speaking to one of the NOC engineers I think we can alter a firewall policy to ensure this doesn't happen again. An RFO report will be sent as always. Thanks Dave

Thanks for thinking of us @pbad. We've moved quite a few schools from Link2ICT already. you'd lose the Link2ICT web filtering but get our Lightspeed instead. If you were using us or a.n.other provider you where would you need to VPN back to? We provide VPN as standard including 2 factor authentication if required. I'm unsure ref CRISP but there are other methods and ways to send information back to the LA. If I can help any more do let me know. Thanks Dave

Whatever you use have a real good in-depth look at its SSL abilities or if it can handoff SSL to endpoint protection. I'd also recommend (if possible) stress testing the throughput of SSL on the vendors firewall in earnest as we find that very often the throughputs given of various boxes do no ring true in a real world environment. E.g. App control can be pretty useless if the traffic is end to end encrypted over SSL and your firewall can't do a man in the middle attack as it won't know what the traffic is if it goes out of a normal port e.g. 443. Good luck Dave

+1 for Fortinet / Fortigate

BT Wholesale offer a contended leased line service. It's about 25% cheaper (from what I recall) than a 1:1 contention ratio but allows isps to offer the up to service on leased lines. We don't offer this service though and only do 1:1 leased line services. We are seeing increased bandwidth demand and we'll continue to see it go up and up. 3 years ago people went from leased lines to fttx. Now we're seeing them go back to leased lines. And when 4k TV starts coming along in earnest we'll see an even bigger shift for bigger bandwidths with secondary schools. Dave