SchoolsBroadband

Hi all, we had over 200 schools move to us when the contact initially came up and we've had a few dozen more in Leicester and Leicestershire over the past month or so join us rather than renewing. If you'd like a quote do send me a PM as I guarantee we'll be more reliable that what you've had and for a much better price inc Lightspeed too. Ta Dave

Hi @genesis, look no further this is something we specifically do for schools. I'll send you a PM. Thanks Dave

Have you thought about putting in a separate wireless network / vlan for your BYOD devices?

Hi folks, sorry for the late reply I'm in London at the moment. In Tameside (I'm presuming that's where you're at @bewlay51 ?)the former LA had the wonderful idea of putting all schools on the same IP address range (please don't ask me why!) which was a 192.168.0.x or similar I believe. This is in contrast to all other LA's who gave schools their own unique IP range. Schools can have the same IP ranges as others so long as we put the school on a different cluster of Lightspeed Rockets in our data centre. Generally this really isn't a problem as its very rare a school has a conflicting IP address range. At point of sale we always ask what your range is and check if their are any potential issues. As you are a previous customer using an onsite Fortigate device I do wonder if this has been overlooked in your case and if so I can only apologise. We will do something to rectify this for you. I'll send you a PM and take it up personally with our technical department. FYI we can do this if you use hosted Fortigate only as Fortinet allow full virtualisation and separation so its fine for schools to have the same IP address but Lightspeed can't. 99.9% of all schools on hosted have Lightspeed though as its the better filtering product hence why we are moving all onsite fortigate only customers to hosted. We really don't have any scaling issues of our solution so please don't let this make you think we can't deliver as we've way over 1,000 schools we've already delivered this to! And as always just send me a PM and I will sort Thanks Dave

Hi @bewlay51, I'm just getting into London on the train but will get back to you later today. Thanks Dave

Good point @kidpressingbuttons what's the point getting a great price for something if it doesn't actually do what it says on the tin?! Dave

Prices are still continuing to come down @Boredguy and @localzuk. We've done a few 100Mbit including Lightspeed and Fortigate for £4,995pa for a primary school. Prices keep on going down and down and down. One of the more costly elements is now doing proper inline anti-virus / IPS wire speed over 100Mbit. Many firewalls are different in the way this is handled and in our opinion if you want to protect yourself properly you need a good UTM device which is ASIC driven. + the good news is that as I'm on Edugeek and own my company I do like doing a "Dave Special" so please get in touch and I'll see how generous I am. It is nearly Xmas after all ;-) Thanks Dave

What speed internet connection do you have as that also dictates what spec box you require and would you like it managed or unmanaged? Thanks Dave

Well if you'd like to shout out about how great we are then I certainly won't complain Thanks for the compliments! Dave

Sure you can monitor the ports and see what is happening. We can also login to your onsite router and see how much traffic is going through. The guys on support can do this for you easily. We can also do a speedtest from your router back to one in our core as well which will show if the line is fine too. We've no network issues at all this morning, everything seems to be running happily. Speedtest.net does generally suck....

you might also want to take a very good look at your firewall / UTM vendors. Does your device offer the same throughput of IPv4 as IPv6? I know a lot of vendors devices that don't and people will be in for a nasty shock, particularly those with big bandwidths.

We so support radius to am extent I think. I'll get one of my engineers to reply shortly. Thanks for the mention Dave

Thanks for that @Oaktech Not to take the subject off topic but if your primary schools had 100Mbit for £5kpa do you think that would be A) affordable and B) justify moving to cloud based services as you can offset server rentals against capex and onsite maintenance costs? Thanks Dave

Afternoon all, I'm doing some research into IaaS platforms as this may be something we look to offer you all in the future. I'll probably do a poll and ask a number of questions but in the mean time could any of you let me know your experience in outsourcing your serves to Microsoft Azure? Has it been good? What servers have you moved to the cloud? What applications have you kept locally? And finally how much do you spend with them and what are the prices MS give you under which licensing agreement? if you'd prefer to PM me then all information will be kept confidential. Thanks for your help as always and glad I'm part of the Edugeek community Dave

yes lets not get into a flame war or anything all good banter Dave

its gartner in case you googled it you can find the result here. Fortinet is the most top right which is one of the reasons why we use it Gartner UTM MQ 2015 | Fortinet Dave

Many different companies offer different support levels for the products they sell and charge accordingly. However its pretty bad if you're told the price is X but then you find its actually Y once you've signed an initial contract. As a supplier to many of you on here I can cast iron guarantee we are not changing our model of support. its 100% included. Call as much as you like and we won't charge you any extra Dave

We've seen quite a lot more network traffic than normal over the past few days but that's because schools come back, turn on their PC's and iPads they may not have done for ages and download a billion updates for Windows and IOS. You should see the bandwidth graphs and what traffic goes where, very interesting. Ref an open recursive DNS @SteveHill is correct, that's a really really bad idea......

Hi @Stephen1, we've been supplying schools with broadband, filtering, email and security services in Leicestershire for nearly 5 years now and dozens use our service. We've just had about another 15 move to us from Capita / Kcom in the past couple of months too as their contracts have come up for renewal. We use the best in breed for filtering and security by having hosted Lightspeed and Fortinet. Many users on this site already use our service. I'll send you a PM. Thanks Dave

we've actually just provisioned quite a few 500/1Gbit lines for secondary schools. As more data goes to the cloud from onsite people want access to faster and faster broadband connections to get at it.

good idea @SteveHill is it still possible to buy hubs?!?!?!

and both full duplex?

yes as sometimes autonegotiation doesn't work correctly.

check for a duplex mismatch on the ports between your router and firewall. Recommend you force both to 100Mbit

We're starting to see a lot more secondary schools take speeds of 200Mbit and above......