SchoolsBroadband

Quite often if you move your voice and data to a single broadband line with a low SLA (which standard broadband is) customers perceive that broadband is not as reliable as PSTN or ISDN so they ask the question "what happens if my Internet connection goes down?" the fact tis they'd lost both voice and data. We could get into many arguments of the fact that copper pairs are normally routed to a building the same way anyway so if there was an issue with a single PSTN line then it would probably effect them all and this to an extent is true. However one more common problem we've seen with other ISP's is that they actually have core outages or an LLU provider does. So if you use 2 separate ISP's and those ISP's also are different LLU providers (or one LLU and one BT Wholesale) then the chances of both of their equipment failing at the phone exchange at the same time is substantially less. The good thing of if you do have 2 x lines from different ISP's with VoIP is that if one does have an issue then you can often move all traffic onto the other line an utilise QOS. At the end of the day its down to the end customer if they wish to pay extra for an additional line to mitigate risk. Finally remember normal broadband as standard does not come with any network level QOS, where as some LLU providers (or via leased lines) can do end to end QOS and guarantee VoIP latency, jitter and packetloss so if their softswitch / PBX is on their own network then they can guarantee the VoIP call all the way back to it, where as if you put a broadband in from one provider and use a VoIP provider which has its equipment located somewhere on the Internet then even though you can do local QOS the packets have to travel over the general Internet and there is no guarantee it will get there, the bandwidth will be available or there will be no issues. Just my 2p. Dave

Thanks Dan He is one of our engineers BTW

Hi, Mikrotiks are very powerful routers but a bit fiddly if you don't know what you're doing. I'll get one of my engineers to respond to you early in the week as I'm on holiday and shouldn't be on Edugeek

We'll it's nice RM and swgfl finally have this feature after other ISPs have had it as standard for over 5 years and don't charge any extra for it. And I'm not just meaning us BTW......

We can do this with our hosted fortigate and lightspeed combo. Pm me for more details. Thanks Dave and

why not just give each school it's own IP address and voila job sorted?

She must have come to me for a "Dave special" then ;-) I'll send you a pm and see if we can do any better for you. Thanks Dave

£10k a year for a 10Mbit???? That seems way expensive unless its in the absolute and utter middle of nowhere. We've won quite a lot of tenders of late and have schools that specifically use what you're doing over a VPLS WAN. Some do use DSL, most EoFTTC or leased lines though and yes it does work fine. Be careful of pulling down profiles with lots of files in though that can saturate links. if you use our VPLS WAN we can prioritise certain types of traffic by IP destination or application to guarantee bandwidth and make sure it works. Again all standard stuff with us so let me know if its of interest. Thanks Dave

yes MBC is being closed down in July 2016 and all using it will have to find alternatives

Hi @mikeyw I believe this should work now but has an impact on per user reporting. We've been working on a fix to properly implement this change and I'm pleased to say our NOC guys are off to London this weekend to install new kit and make it work. There will also be access to some additional Lightspeed features which you couldn't get in the past which will be nice We'll be going through and extensive period of testing but if you'd like to beta and check it first then send me a PM. Thanks Dave Dave

Yes I believe they do http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCEQFjAAahUKEwi6uIjTlN3GAhVJWtsKHQtLB-A&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcookbook.fortinet.com%2Fdownload%2F3127%2F&ei=QVWmVfqTDMm07QaLlp2ADg&usg=AFQjCNFNeKEYzsIO7WA4Iw_LJDVYTjfA2Q&bvm=bv.97653015,d.ZGU

no they'll still act as a full firewall and can do everything bar the UTM functionality. e.g can do wireless controller, firewalls, VPN, etc etc the UTM functionality includes (but not limited to) Web filtering App control AD integration Anti spam in line anti virus. You can continue to purchase the UTM licences through us or any Fortinet partner. Thanks Dave

I do actually. I've a 1 x 110C - £450 each 4 x 100D - £600 each (RRP 1836 + VAT!!!)

Yes you can do Lightspeed transparently on site too. Remember to sort out the proxy or man in the middle option deploying certificates to everything.

£120 and £225 inc vat I should also point out that some of them have some UTM licences still applied but these are renewable annually once they expire. Thanks Dave

Hi all, we've near enough ripped out all of out onsite Fortigate boxes from customers and have now migrated them to the cloud which we been doing over the past few years. So I'm sat on about 400 Fortigate Firewalls. Most of them are 40C or 40C wifi but we also have some 60C and 80C / CM's. Price starts at only £50 for devices which are worth between £500 to £1200 brand new + VAT. If anybody wants to grab themselves a bargain just let me know. Postage is £10 too. See http://www.fortinet.com/sites/default/files/productdatasheets/FortiGate-40C.pdf Thanks Dave

wow love that! I might get some for our guys in NOC Dave

By default Fortigates can do the endpoint AV part and we've already rolled this out to quite a lot of schools. It can't do the email encryption though to my knowledge. Google Forticlient. Thanks Dave

We're a big Lightspeed fan but also a fan of Fortigate and have hundreds deployed. What problem are you having with the Fortigate? Maybe we can give you some free advice on how to improve it? Fortigates are brilliant firewalls.

you can do a man in the middle attack on all traffic, proxy all SSL traffic or proxy SSL traffic to certain destinations only. it's very good. We've deployed it in a hosted environment to over 1,000 schools now and can't recommend it enough. PM me if you want a price as hosted is a lot cheaper to onsite with little difference in functionality. Thanks Dave

I'm surprised its taken them (and other ISP's) this long to actually do it all in the cloud. We've been doing it for years now as standard. It's not exactly rocket science.......

yes you can. We offer both variants depending on what a customer needs

We've done this for quite a few schools using 3G and 4G sim cards when they have 1:1 ipad deployments. The biggest problem when using mobile though is the coverage. If an area can only get 2G then there's not really much point in having it as it'll be so slow. As standard we can filter all 3G and 4G connections and link this into our hosted Ligthspeed filtering product so they are protected too. Mobile has the advantage of not being overly expensive and once a user hits a set data limit the connection can be throttled if required so no big data bills get sent. PM me if you're interested. Thanks Dave

happy birthday folks

Just to confirm this is the Schools own broadband outage and not an outage for us (Schools Broadband) Dave