SchoolsBroadband

Evening all, Fortigate have advised us to replace firewall 3 which is happening late this evening with a new unit. It's early days but they think that one of the WAN uplink ports may have become faulty and is causing the device to reboot under certain situations. There's emergency maintenance happening tonight to replace the unit and we'll update you once complete. All customers will have received the notification this evening. Thanks Dave

Very high level we'd recommend an MPLS WAN utilising with hosted firewalls (shared or dedicated) in a providers data centre. From there as you're so reliant on Microsoft Azure and Office 365 based services then you may also wish to purchase a Microsoft Express Route port which gives you guaranteed 1:1 bandwidth into Microsoft and allows you to do QOS all the way to them rather than over general ISP peering links. We've already quoted large MAT's on this solution and I expect some of them to take us up on our offer soon. Point to point links may be a good idea if you have any sites close to one another. I'd also recommend checking what your actual bandwidth utilisation is at the moment on all of your links too. Don't use normal FTTC whatever you do as there's no proper quality of service of bandwidth guarantees on that service. Look at EoFTTC or leased lines. Prices for Ethernet leased lines have come down a lot of late and will do again, particularly in 2018 with the release of the BT Dark Fibre product. Using VPN encryption puts a slight packet overhead on communications but none you'd probably notice, particularly when on a decent speed leased line. We've a number of clients with 40+ sites (our largest being about 85) utilising their own MPLS WAN doing exactly what you're after so feel free to get in touch if you'd like some advice or an introductory meeting. Thanks Dave

Yes this is technically possible for us to do. I was speaking with one of our engineers this week and we need to make a customer category to do so. There are implications to other users though if we do allow Vimeo specific filtering as I believe some Vimeo may be a banned site by default due to some video's being inappropriate. I'll get back to you in due course. Thanks Dave

All, No problem with Lightspeed at all. A Fortinet HA issue on one of the cluster with Fortinet TAC. We are investigating and will report back asap as always. Dave

hi @mikkydoos, we've quite a few schools using our service in the Birmingham area and they have been for the past 6-7 years. You can take our leased lines services with or without our Lightspeed and Fortinet content filtering & security package. We're one of a few ISP's to have a strategic partnership accreditation with Virgin Media Wholesale so we should be able to offer you a very competitive leased line price. I'll send you a PM Cheers Dave

hi @Stevecee, I think we've a few schools in Worcestershire that already use our service. happy to come and see you so will send you a PM. Dave

@tinca492. Please contact your account manager or me if you get a slow response. FYI filter 11 is having new hardware installed next week. Dave

We might be able to set that up though. Let me pass it onto one of our product guys to take a look at and we'll get back to you. Thanks Dave

Normally after Openreach has done their work and handed the EAD LA circuit to the telco (BT Wholesale, TTB, Vodafone etc) it then takes a couple of days for the telco to setup the rest of the circuit (VLAN's etc) but sometimes this can take up to 10 working days if any other work needs to be done in the exchange of the telco has some work to do on their network e.g. install new line cards in the exchange. We're nearly there @nathan. The wait will definitely be worth it It was good to speak with you yesterday too. Dave

Hi @tinca492, thanks for the good comments ref the extension of your LAN. VPLS over our core network as standard allows this at no additional cost on installation and has saved our clients a lot of money. Regarding an onsite Lightspeed Rocket, we can supply these but the licensing model is different. You'd need to pay for the physical server and then licences on a per user basis where as our hosted Lightspeed Rockets is no setup fee and a site licence for any primary or secondary school which saves schools a lot of money compared to putting devices on site. if you'd prefer to go to an onsite Rocket then do let me or your account manager know and we'd be happy to help. More info will be available in the not so distant future regarding plans Thanks Dave

Hi @nathan, i'm sorry to hear of the predicament you are in. I can look into the 3G/4G dongle usage issue for you and the costs associated to that and will do tomorrow. Regarding quick wins and general installs by ultimately BT Openreach we push and push and push and push and although things are better than they used to be BT Openreach still have BIG issues at the moment and will continue to do so for some time. You'd be surprised at how much work we do in the background constantly hounding them to actually get things done. They in turn often use contractors to deliver new services which doesn't help much either. Having a quick win should be just that where a line can go in much quicker than its supposed to do. I've not heard of a quick win taking about a month to then install. They are normally done within a couple of weeks or even days. Our record is a leased line installed and live in only 7 days. We are again though having to rely on BT Openreach and they often make mistakes. BT Openreach do not hold themselves accountable to any consequential loss or costs incurred to any carrier or customer in the delay of a circuit. The 3G / 4G solution we've come up with is to do best efforts to have something as an interim whilst the other line goes in. I know we do not look to make any profit in dealing with our customers misfortunes here and lend the kit and do not charge for the time out engineers take to install the system. I'm free for a chat as always and am in the office all day tomorrow so please do feel free to give me a call. I can look into what's going on with your installation. I may also be able to send this to the directors office (DSO) at BT although they may reject any application as you still do have some form of connectivity. Our main number is 01133222333 Thanks Dave

PM'd....

Thanks for the support all. We've a lot going on in the background which at the moment is all I can say so watch this space. We always do go that extra mile to help our customers and as per @IrritableTech mentions we are an all inclusive service and don't have any hidden costs many of our competitors do. Thanks Dave

Wow 2 days notice!

With respect @synaesthesia unlike most LA's and other providers we do actually pay service credits and this is dependant on the technology you use and how much you pay to use it when it's not working. I 100% understand the huge ramifications of when a school has no Internet (online registers, duty of care etc) but no ISP will open themselves to any consequential losses as if there is a big outage whether in their control or not then it could bankrupt them. We actually go over an above what our carrier partners pay us in the event of any issue. If our carriers offered us a better compensation scheme for not hitting SLA or downtime then we'd certainly pass that on. At the end of the day though on the whole all ISP's use BT or Virgin Media and we can only replicate what they offer us or offer slightly better without taking a huge risk to our business. Has anyone here ever had a service credit in cash from the LA? I highly doubt it. Don't get me wrong though we never want to have to give out service credits and want everything 100% stable. All I'll say at the moment is that there's likely to be some big changes coming in the not so distance future. I can't say any more than that at the moment. We are certainly not resting on our laurels. Thanks for your continued support. Dave

@jertsy PM'd....

Crikey that doesn't sound right. I'll pm you shortly and make sure we call you in the morning. Dave

Evening @FN-GM, We test them regularly. What we can't test for is bugs for obvious reasons. Our fortigate platform has generally been very stable with most having 100% uptimr since its inception. Nobody likes any downtime or issues but if it happens we're always the first to hold our hands up. Dave

Hi all, Sorry for my late reply I've been away from the office. A couple of issues today. 1. An aggregation router went bang and had to be physically replaced. 2. An interface on the Fortigate stopped working and didn't force a failure to the backup unit. That issue has been raised to Fortinet TAC and we await their response on what the issue is. This only effected a small subset of customers but we'll work with the vendors as to why it happened. The dead router has a new unit in place. Sorry for the short notice but I'm on my phone away from baswe will be in touch with all effected. Dave

a few more things Do you want ADSL backup to be on a completely separate router for extra redundancy? Do you want a higher care level on a single router? i.e. man to site within 4 hours in case of router failure? Do you want 2 factor authentication for VPN and / or other remote services? I'm sure I'll think of more Dave

Thanks @HBPS, @djm968 we already look after a few MAT's in Essex and the surrounding areas. I think we may have heard from you this morning already If you've any questions do send me a PM. Dave

I'd normally recommend a leased line when you're above 300 pupils and you've a reliance on IT to help deliver lessons. Particularly if you do any kind of tablet rollouts. Leased lines are much more affordable than they once were. For primary schools we can now do a 100Mbit leased line to the majority of the country for the equivalent of £375pm with a one off install cost which is pretty damn good considering what the prices were 3 years ago. Dave

BT Infinity Premium will not guarantee 60Mbit. This may be the speed at which it can sync at to the VDSL DSLAM in the BT green street cabinets but it's not guaranteed 1:1 contention ratio whatsoever hence why they've put the caveat in saying its contended with other businesses in the area so how can in that case they guarantee a speed of 60Mbit?! EoFTTC does give you guaranteed speeds up to a certain amount which is 1:1 contention ratio and a much higher SLA. The standard SLA on a BT Wholesale based FTTC connection is something of the ilk "BT Wholesale guarantees to deliver speeds of 12Mbit for 90% of the time during the busiest 3 hour period". You can pay to get the enhanced care on the line which increases this to 15Mbit as above but we find it's not worth the paper it's written on. It's a bit of a minefield as to what you can and can't do with FTTC and EoFTTC connections. We pioneered EoFTTC for one of our carrier partners and I'm so glad we did. It's an excellent product and well worth paying a bit more for. It even gives you things like a slightly larger MTU size so we can run full VPLS over it where as you can't with standard FTTC. Also EoFTTC comes with a much higher support level than standard FTTC connections. Send me a PM or put some more questions on here if I can help at all. Thanks Dave

Other things I'd recommend you ask for / consider are Do you want the firewalling / filtering service to be managed / unmanaged? Do you want an engineer to attend site to install / handover all different services or not? Do you want to use someone else's hosted firewalls / content filtering devices which should give you hardware resilience? i.e. active / passive, active / active Are you looking to be able to filter pupils / staff onsite and offsite? If taking a managed service what's the SLA on support? Are you charged for changes or is it unlimited support? Are you charged for software upgrades to filtering / firewall? Do you get full reporting on a per user basis? (needed for prevent duty etc) Does the ISP charge for things like SMTP server, reverse DNS entries, support IPv6. We've installed thousands of schools Internet, filtering and security solutions so once you've written your tender do let me know and we'd be happy to quote. Thanks Dave

a BT EAD is just a BT Openreach fibre product. An EAD links two sites together, where as an EAD LA circuit links your site back to the local telephone exchange. The later is what's used when installing most leased line circuits. We've installed thousands of them. Installation can be a pain in the back side if no BT fibre exists onsite already