SchoolsBroadband

yes we've training videos etc I believe. You should be sent the links or they're available via the portal once you have access. Dave

PM'd. Sorry its not been up and running for you yet. Sounds like a communication issue on our part. We have been activating hundreds of schools on this our new product so I know the teams have been busy but still it sounds like something has gone wrong. If you can answer your PM please then we'll get this sorted for you asap. Thanks Dave

I've got the list. PM me with your school and I'll let you know if you're in. Thanks Dave

Nope no network issues whatsoever. I've messaged @Badaz52 to see if I can help at all as its likely to be an issue with an individual line. Dave

yes, the press release is here https://newsroom.bt.com/hundreds-of-primary-schools-to-get-lightning-fast-broadband-under-governments-project-gigabit-rollout/ This will be available for ourselves, RM, Wave9, Exa etc to utilise as the network has to be wholesaleable. Thanks Dave

We offer Cityfibre Leased Lines today, Cityfibre FTTP ETA is about 2 months and we'll have nationwide access to the product. We can also offer their dark fibre services in certain cities where we can do some cracking deals on 10Gbps bearers. Do give me a DM if you'd like to know what we can offer for you in full. Thanks Dave

We're here and the ticket will be closed an replied to. The team are flat out configuring IPSEC VPNs as per my last post and are having to prioritise tickets. I can though answer your question myself. Regarding the FortiGate vulnerability, this has been alleviated by disabling SSL VPN on our estate following us working with Fortinet. Having discussed with our NOC engineers we are now in receipt of new firmware which fixes the vulnerability in the SSL VPN engine of FortiOS. As we use very large hosted firewalls that each have hundreds of customers on, the new firmware must go through Q&A and rigorous testing before its rolled out so there's no impact to our customer base. We will communicate when the maintenance work to do this will go ahead in due course with a more in depth explanation that I've posted here. Thanks Dave

@Pheonix121 we are working through the backlog at the moment. We've 2,500 schools using our services so as you can imagine even if a quarter of them use SSL VPN then that's a lot of reconfiguration work to IPSEC. That said, its a lot better than if the bug in the SSL VPN engine was exploited and the chaos that could have caused. I do feel rather sorry for all those Fortinet MSPs that have to either upgrade their firewalls or turn SSL VPN off. Lets hope for their sake they're using FortiManager..... If its really important you need IPSEC VPN immediately please call the team and they'll try do it for you there and then. Dave

I've been assured we did send comms. I'll check with you both personally. Should have come in via email to you both if you're the contact in the hub Dave

Hi folks, sorry for my late reply on this I have been in meetings most of the day. Comms have gone out today and is in response to a new FortiGate 0 day vulnerability which we have quickly contained. Thanks Dave

Hi folks, sorry for my late reply on this I have been in meetings most of the day. Comms have gone out today and is in response to a new FortiGate 0 day vulnerability which we have quickly contained. Thanks Dave

Hi folks. We had one of our many hosted FortiGates go into conserve mode due to what appears to be a bug in the OS. We had to manually force the failover to another device and reboot the affected unit. The FortiGates are normally pretty stable with many of them running for years with no issues. Please see the status portal case 1052. Some of the original hosted FortiGates are due for a hardware upgrade in the next 12 months to allow for greater throughputs. This is likely to be a combination of F series and also the new G series once that virtualised box is available (q4 I'm being told for the later). Thanks Dave

@WannabrewUK and @sigma I've messaged you both back. I won't get dragged into the other comments which are fundamentally incorrect and by the usual people. Thank you though to all our customers who do continue to use our services and re-sign of their own free will year after year. Dave

Morning guys. Official comms to come out shortly. There was a major sub sea cable break which our transit providers use this morning. We know this is affecting numerous providers. We are seeing some applications work, some not and some being very slow. This is particularly affecting anything in the states but other UK hosting providers and isps are also having issues. Official comms to come shortly. Thank Dave

Hi folks, I don't want to comment on RM specifically but I can enlighten you as to why most ISPs that are using BT Openreach based lines are starting to see annual price rises. I forget the exact percentage and calculation off hand (so please take the workings with a slight pinch of salt) but as of 1st April 2023 BT Openreach were allowed to increase their prices to anyone using any of their services (phone lines, broadband, FTTP, EAD LA (Leased line) by CPI + 4.x%. This was a deal done with the regulator Ofcom. The reason BT Openreach were allowed to do this is because they are investing billions of pounds in Ultrafast FTTP services around the country and they needed to recoup some of that investment quicker so we were allowed to increase their wholesale costs so long as they kept on building at pace. These price increases can be applied as of the 1st of April each year. BT Openreach don't have to increase them but so far they have on most products other than FTTP. e.g. SOGEA / FTTC has increased by more than the cost of FTTP to push ISPs and therefore consumers to switch from super fast to Ultrafast broadband. This means that the money BT uses to roll out Ultrafast broadband can be recouped quicker. There are also incentive schemes to carriers such as Talk Talk and BT Wholesale called Equinox 2 that further discounts FTTP over other technologies if they sell enough of it. We and other ISPs predominantly consume layer 2 connections from carrier such as Talk Talk or BT Wholesale when using BT Openreach connectivity. We buy from them and they put their markup from buying from BT Openreach. As part of their service to us, Talk Talk and BT Wholesale have to also add on costs for taking the connection from the local telephone exchange back to our data centres. We in turn then put our margin on for the costs of our network, engineers and Internet / peering connections to deliver the service to our end customer. With BT Openreach increasing their wholesale cost for the EAD LA service (this is a leased line in common talk) to Talk Talk and BT Wholesale then these carriers will inevitably pass on BT Openreachs charges to their customers (i.e. us and RM) and we in turn can take the decision either to pass them on or not pass them on. Sometimes the middle carrier may add some slight margin onto the cost pass through to us the ISP. I've seen different amounts charged by different carriers but as a minimum they at least pass on the wholesale price increase from BT Openreach. Other carriers such as Virgin can ultimately charge what they want. Last year they generally had big price increases but this year I don't believe Virgin are increasing their prices. I have not yet heard from Talk Talk or BT Wholesale as to how much their price increases will be as I've been discussing with our account managers. The BT Openreach price rise was only announced just before Xmas so all the carriers are figuring out what to do whilst still staying as competitive as they can. My point is that if you're buying a BT Openreach based leased line then expect / budget for a price rise this year. My crystal ball says the price increase to end customers will be from £100 - £120pa per leased line circuit and £12-£18pa per FTTC / SOGEA although these are still tbc. So long as the increases are inline with that then ISPs won't be making any additional money I don't know what RM has put its prices up by and if they've even taken BT Openreach price rises into account yet so can't comment on that. I hope that helps set the scene on future price rises and why Ofcom has allowed BT to do them. If you've any questions please do let me know here or via a PM. Cheers Dave P.S BT Openreach haven't increased their 10Gbps leased line costs so anyone on a 10Gbps bearer shouldn't get a price increase directly via BT Openreach

What a player he was....

It was rather short notice wasn't @Wave9_Lee? Likewise, we've Schools that have been using us for nearly a decade in Kent. Some individual, some part of MATs so feel free to get in touch with me also. FYI you might want to move this post to South East Grid for Learning (SEGfL) or another geographical regional forum. Thanks Dave

Hello @synaesthesia and everyone else. I was personally invited (and accepted) to be part of the DFE steering committee on this as well as a number of other ISPs to help put forward our views on what the standard could look like. Ultimately the DFE decided what that should be without informing us until we saw a draft version for comment and the final standard was then released. Please note the word "should" rather than "must". In my mind "should" means "where ever financially viable and technically possible". From memory the DFE didn't want to rule out the use of other technologies such as wireless where this was more economically viable e.g. a point to point link from a secondary school acting as a hub to a remote primary school with no available fibre or ridiculous construction charges. For secondary schools please note the words "capacity to deliver". i.e. you can take a lower bandwidth if you don't need a full 1Gbps connection and therefore can upgrade at a later date. To my knowledge the same standards are being used for the next Gigahub project where hundreds of schools are going to be connected using FTTP. Feel free to send me over any questions you may have and I can also send over to the DFE for comment if you think that'd be helpful but I believe I'm correct on my assumptions. Thanks Dave

Ultimately it depends on location and the carriers the ISP has access to as well as what you get for your filtering (i.e. do you get UTM with that or is it just basic filtering?). Also is it two routers (one for backup, one for primary) or is it just one? How much management does it include and what SLA do you get? It does seem a bit on the high side but at £5.8k not massively so if it was for UTM with two routers, full management and leased line SLA. The only thing I'm more surprised about is that its for 100Mbps rather than 200Mbps as many of the carriers have special offers on at the moment. Again though this does depend on location. Happy to give you a quote to compare as well. Thanks Dave

We do offer hosted FortiGate filtering too in conjunction with our own Incident Management Reporting Platform. We're serving about 200 customers in Hampshire using that specifically as well as a number of many MATs. Thanks Dave

Being a Fortinet partner and protecting about 2,500 schools and some of the largest MATs in the UK with it then we'd obviously recommend Fortinet, Fortinet and more Fortinet We can offer our hosted service which you rent space on or physical boxes. All Fortinet onsite boxes also come with SD-WAN included as well as additional functionality such as Sandboxing, Internet of compromise etc. More than happy for a Fortinet NSE certified tech to give you a call to discuss if you'd like? Cheers Dave

Patch being rolled out probably on Tuesday after going through q&a. Status portal will be updated shortly. Dave

Hi folks. Sorry for not answering sooner. I've been away on leave for a few days. Netsweeper has confirmed to us there's a software bug that has been found. It's quite complicated and is only particularly affecting one of our many policy servers. Netsweeper are working on fixing the bug ASAP and we're hopeful a patch will be deployed this week. Please follow the status portal for all updates. Thanks Dave

Yes, the issue is with Netsweeper developers at the moment as its not a software config issue that we've done. It isn't common across our entire platform and even on the policy server you've mentioned isn't the same for all changes. Sporadic issues are always the hardest to diagnose but we're working with Netsweeper to address them. We currently don't have many active cases on this from our customers although it sounds like you've been impacted more than others which we do apologise for of course. Please keep an eye on the status portal as always as that will be updated as soon as we have something from Netsweeper with a final plan on how to address the issue. Thank you for your patience Dave

Our core Cisco network has had 100% uptime since its inception and our included anti ddos solution protects all of our customers and fends off large attacks each day. The only time we've ever had an issue with connectivity only customers has been when a carrier nni (interconnect has failed) or Equinix Ld8 went down. If you want even greater resilience from a pure connectivity point of view you can also purchase vlan shadowing to another data centre or take a backup line which uses another carrier which terminates in another of our data centres. Happy to talk it through and also put you in touch with connectivity onky customers. We're in the process of rolling out connectivity only for one large 40 school Mat I can probably put you in touch with too. Do send me a PM and I'll put you in touch with a number of connectivity only customers or I'm sure others will post here too. Individual lines can of course have issues but this would normally be down to carrier or perhaps the odd onsite router goes bang. Dave