SchoolsBroadband

FYI if you're part of a MAT you could always put your Lightspeed Rocket in our Data centre, MPLS / VPLS all schools back into a Virtual firewall and have full control of your rocket. We tend to see only the bigger MAT's doing this but it can work out very nicely and give a lot of flexibility including the option to put your own servers into our dedicated co-location and have their resources shared across all schools. Alternatively if you do a lot of Azure we can even get you your own dedicated Microsoft Expressroute connection. Dave

There's very little difference between an onsite Rocket and a hosted one. Most of the functionality is with the network configuration and RADIUS keys etc which we take care of. You get your own dedicated tier which gives you 99% of the functionality of the web filter compared to buying your own box. I'd suggest you put your questions to our Solutions Architect on the exact differences so he can let you know what they are and if it'll effect you. Most customers are fine being on a dedicated tier. It's very rare we ever sell an onsite box although you could keep this if you wanted and just use our hosted firewall. Thanks Dave

We can do on-site Fortigates and Lightspeed or hosted fortigate and onsite Lightspeed but the costs are much more than going 100% cloud and it's also not as scalable. Dave

+1 Schools Broadband of course As standard in my opinion we offer a lot more than RM. For starters you can have your own virtualised firewall and have full control of all UTM functionalities without any capital expenditure costs. This also makes the solution a lot more scalable. e.g. if you took a 100/1Gbit now and in 2 years time wanted to upgrade to a 500/1Gbit then if you were to do full SSL decryption on most firewalls then you'd have to put the firewall in the bin and get a new one. Using hosted gives you scalability as we have much bigger firewalls and we upgrade so no capex costs for you. There's lots of other features of course too. Free Lightspeed MDM for year 1, free SIP trunking on a longer term contract (coming very soon), free wireless controller, enhanced user based reporting as standard. If you've any questions do send me a PM or post here and I'll reply. Thanks for considering us. Dave

We're big Lightspeed fans here.

When bt installs a leased line they let the isp ordering it know what excess construct charges (ECCs) are. This includes digging, drilling, installing tubing and fibre etc. When BT gives the isp the amount they then deduct £2800 from this and that should be the end figure the end user pays. Some isps add percentages onto this however we do not. Thanks Dave

Sounds like an odd issue. I'm in London all day and tomorrow but will take a look as to how the issue could have happened. Thanks Dave

Sounds like an odd issue. I'm in London all day and tomorrow but will take a look as to how the issue could have happened. Thanks Dave

Brand new equipment. We can use Cisco, Yaelink, polycom, Panasonic and a few more phone types

All telecoms firms are subject to the same Ofcom porting rules.

yes you can. Ofcom make it a requirement to be able to port numbers between providers. We've migrated plenty of numbers from Virgin Media onto our VoIP service. If you need any advice just let me know Dave

That's not right @Fazza. The Fortigate firewall itself does come with little reporting but if you purchase Forticloud (Cloud based reporting) or FortiAnalyzer (dedicated box or VM) then you get a huge amount of reporting functionality which is actually quite brilliant. Dave

We're big Lightspeed and Fortinet fans here. Both can do the job and reporting is excellent, fast and easy to us. Dave

There are plenty of other hosted VoIP providers which won't tie you into their connectivity piece. @Wave9_Lee is correct in what he says. Once tied in to an LA VoIP service we've seen lots of horror stories around schools trying to leave but having overlapping contracts with the VoIP and leased line so having to pay out contracts. Sometimes we've even see LA's refusing to allow the schools numbers to port out as they belong to the LA and not the school!!!! Best double check this with whoever you move to. We offer very competitive hosted VoIP telephony systems too. PM me if you'd like some information. Thanks Dave

Migrations take a couple of weeks normally. So at the latest i'd say 3 weeks just in case. Dave

I'd suggest they look at something like Onedrive if they are only wanting to share files so no VPN required at all. Dave

Thanks for the thumbs up @nathan and @ChrisC Since it's inception over 5 years ago we've had less than 1 minute downtime on our core Cisco network..... We get DDoS'd every other day and can soak most of them up. If we get a big one then this can normally be mitigated sub a couple of minutes as we're pretty quick at picking them up an dealing with them. Even then it doesn't effect everyone. Dave

Sounds like a phone system problem but just in case ask our guys to do a debug on the traffic via the firewall if this goes out via our Internet connection to see if we can see anything odd. Thanks Dave

Well that would be quite self defeating of us to do so as the ticket would just be re-opened again. We've a lot less tickets as we've had no major outages for quite some time. We can of course setup a static route for you. You can also set one up on the Fortigate firewall if required too yourself (if your school has its own dedicated virtual firewall) if you reply to the case even if closed then it will automatically be re-opened. Alternatively send me a PM and I'll speak to the engineer in question personally and take up for you. Thanks Dave

PM'd. Open tickets are at an all-time low at the moment so I'm surprised we're not getting back in a timely fashion. You should have your SLA which shows the escalation matrix of who to contact if you're not happy with someone. The online graph in our portal does a 5 minute average (as is standard in the industry). We can also login to your router and do some live traffic stats which is what I've suspected our support department have done. We can send you screenshots of this to prove if you're maxing your line out too. If you can reply to your PM i'll look into it personally for you. Thanks Dave

Hello @TMBS, as it looks like we're the broadband provider can i suggest the following 1. put your phones on a completely separate VLAN to all other devices. 2. We can install a dedicated 2Mbit VLAN onto a dedicate port on your router. This then terminates into a virtual interface on your Fortinet firewall and will by pass Lightspeed. filtering too. By doing this we guarantee VoIP 2Mbit across our core and our carriers network. 3. What codec are you using and how many concurrent calls are you wishing to make? Gamma defaults to G711a i believe but you can also use G729 which uses less bandwidth. if you need more then we can give you a bigger sized guaranteed bandwidth. 4. Do you phones run passthrough? i.e. do they have PC's plugged into them at the moment? This is sometimes done to save on CAT5 sockets. Your phones should still be VLAN aware but your phone system company many have to configure this. 5. We sell Gamma SIP trunks ourselves and have few issues with them once in and working. if you wanted to we could migrate the SIP trunk to our account with Gamma and we can take charge of it all meaning we can do diagnostics at Gamma's end into our network from their equipment rather than playing Chinese whispers between us, your current supplier, you and Gamma. 6. Alternatively you could buy a Gamma Assured IP broadband, make a separate VLAN and plug all phones into that. We or your current supplier should be able to do this for you. Send me a PM and I'll be happy to help. Thanks Dave

You'd be surprised with BT's new quick win policy we've had some new leased line installs in and working in only 10 days!

We can offer end to end QOS into Gamma. Your ISP just needs to have a private interconnect into them. Dave

That's just capacity planning from the ISP and that shouldn't happen. Leased lines should come with those guarantees and do from the carriers. Touch wood so far the only speed issues we've had from carriers is where they've provisioned it wrong at a lower speed than they should have. When using standard FTTC or a Virgin Media Cable modem always look at the traffic shaping policies. Never trust the word "uncongested" when talking about FTTC as this is just marketing spin as the technology does not give any guaranteed speeds unless it's EoFTTC. Dave

Going back many years ago I once saw a school with an 8.0.0.0/8 subnet mask. Genius when many of Googles services are in there Dave