SchoolsBroadband

Well this seems mad to me. If a customer cancels their contract or asks to cancel at the expiry of the term then there's no cease fee at all. Not for adsl, fttc or leased line. We incur a small charge for adsl or fttc but soak this up as part of the contract cost. We've never been charged a cease fee for a leased line by our carriers and we've access to them all (BT, Talk Talk, Virgin etc) who are exactly the same carriers as swgfl and others use so for me I think it is unfair to charge a school for what is essentially just an admin fee for them leaving. I don't like charges like that and consider them stealthy and not in the spirit of good business. Certainly it just annoys customers even more and you can then definitely kiss your chances of them coming back in the future. Just me thoughts. Dave

Interesting....... Think I'll get in touch with our account manager and see what's on offer....

both

This week Amazon is in at number 4. Probably to do with a load of Xmas shopping and black Friday I'm guessing as its usually a bit further down the list......

Hi folks, we've been using some new network monitoring statistics for our core network and thought we'd share it with you if its of interest as it may help you plan for your bandwidth usage in the future. We just took 2 x private 10gbit Interconnects into Google (not peering or via transit this is a direct physical cable). Top destinations so far this month (excluding our non hosted customers) 1. Google (inc youtube) - 135 Terabytes (135,000 Gigabytes ish!) 2. Akamai / Microsoft - 69 Terabytes 3 Apple - 25 Terabytes Just goes to show the change in usage patterns. I expect these to go up more and more as people migrate to Office 365, Google apps and Ipad deployments. Enjoy Dave

PM'd thanks for getting in touch.

I would like to point out we will be giving free coffee and chocolate at our stand again so please do pop along even if you're not in the slightest bit interested about broadband

I believe that with RM you don't get access to change your firewall polices also. you have to go via a support desk to get it done. Where as with us or if you have your own onsite UTM / Firewall then you get full access to change everything. Also with RM's standard filtering AD integration is an additional extra (I believe £350pa although I may be not 100% right on cost but they give it FOC year 1). My view is that both Lightspeed and Smoothwall are far superior products to RM safetynet which is why RM sell them on top of their standard offering if schools want it. Also check out for other things that need to be added onto the package that you may get with other suppliers as standard. If you want a quote from us then please PM me and I'd be happy to oblige Dave

@MrPstv I know we've been in touch before and I'm not sure if you're going to be using us going forward or not but if you want to speak to anybody our customers currently using vpls over numerous sites then let me know. Also I'm about to take another 5 racks in one of our data centers in London and can do some rather special pricing if it's of interest for putting your servers there rather than at the secondary school. Thanks Dave

No problem. Just been to see my support manager. You'll get a call today whilst a senior engineer looks into it for you

Hi @Cache will send you a PM to find out which school it is and I'll investigate for you this morning. We don't have any speed issues on the hosted platform. With the big windows and office updates on Tuesday we saw a lot of customers max their lines out (particular when on slower DSL) but have not had any speed issue reports since. I'll be in touch. Thanks Dave

Well people walk with their feet. We've had a lot of annoyed SWGFL customers join us this year. If a service keeps on breaking that you rely on and pay a small fortune for then leave. Whether that be to us or another provider. We've had 100% uptime i the last 18 months whether that be proxy, firewall or core network. Also why are changes made in the day time?! We ban anything but the highest level of emergency maintenance for anything happening in the day time. All upgrades are done in the early hours of the morning which makes sense so if it goes wrong people are not affected....

This could be MTU related (although we have standard configs so the MTU should be fixed). It certainly sounds very odd. I'll pick up with my engineers in the morning. Thanks Dave

yes we can do that and build another VLAN back to the customers site but if other clients are still using the Internet the doing a speed test on a single PC connected to another port will not give a true accurate speedtest as other clients will be using the Internet bandwidth..... If (and not just for this customer) people are thinking they have speed issues and can't disconnect the LAN then suggest its done out of hours

ok well if you've had a laptop plugged into the router and are not getting full speeds then something probably isn't right elsewhere. We have no speed issues on our core network though and don't have any similar faults from any other customers to my knowledge. I'm on the road today but will take up with my support team tomorrow morning. Watch this space and thanks for your patience David

Have you tried removing your lan and just plugging in a laptop to the router to see what results you get? This will eliminate if it's a lan problem or not? When you bio it male sure you call our support team to check the duplex is OK. Dave

interesting

@MikeGreen, smells like a DNS issue to me. Check your DNS forwarders on your Windows server(s) if they're responsible for your internal DNS. Also check if you have any DNS servers manually configured on each PC too. If you need me to get involved let me know and PM me the ticket number. Thanks Dave

Have you never heard of a witless network?! It lacks depth that's for sure Sorry folks the predictive text on my HTC can be a bit random to say the least ;-)

This is actually very easy to do. You can do point to point witless that distance at gbit speeds or private point to point circuits running at 100mbit, 1gbit and even 10gbit. If you like a quote let me know and I'll pm you a quick one. We've done this for lots of schools already. Good luck. David

Hi folks, I'm not sure if you are aware but we have a specialist wholesale mobile division which is part of the Talk Straight Group. We've one particular tariff that gives unlimited minutes, unlimited sms text, 5Gig of data for £20 a month and is on a rolling 30 day contract. We do all the billing and support and just add it onto your monthly bill from us. PM me if its of interest. Ta Dave

I agree with this too. Sure there's price pressures but people will pay for a service they want and do what they require. They won't always just go cheaper if it doesn't do what is required.

Just so you know BT now pay the first £2,800 worth of ECC's. Yes the grids did help in the past getting infrastructure in but this money from the public pocket was to enable the schools to get high speeds and a quality service. Not to then say you can only ever use it if you use the grid in the future. Dave

Hi folks, we've got quite a few MAT's doing what many of you have already suggested. If you can use local point to point links for primary schools then we find most MATs host most of their services, AD and filestore in one of the secondary schools and have this as a big huge. Sometimes they also replicate to another secondary school. If you have sites that could be all over the country and not local then those larger MATs host servers in our data centre instead. This gives the servers up to 10Gbit core connectivity which doesn't saturate a single link to one secondary school. We're also about to launch an IaaS (similar to MS Azure) product so you can simply "spin up" additional server, CPU and disk resources on any VLAN you require over your WAN at the click of a few buttons. This enables you to also do end to end QOS across your entire WAN and give flexibility when adding more resources. All sites can come with additional DSL, FTTC or EoFTTC backup or a leased line via an alternate carrier. I can put you in touch with some of our customers if you'd like and you can chat with them about how they do it? Thanks Dave

Hi @1066girl we've well over a thousand hosted VoIP licences in schools. you'd be surprised at how cheap it really is as we see it more as a value add solution than something we sell on the whole. I've a huge stock of refurb Mitel phones at the moment so quite happy to do a deal too PM me if of interest. Thanks Dave