SchoolsBroadband

OMG I am soooooooo excited about this I've actually bought a decent PC to play it on! What does everyone think of it so far? I'm going to have a go over the weekend. I remember playing elite and frontier days on end when I was a teenager.... Dave

Hi @mattasquith, we currently provide access to quite a few around the country. Answers are below, I hope this helps 1. On average each site has about 350 students 2. In some cases yes, in others no. It depends on the management company and how they the sell this to the students. e.g some management companies include a 10Mbit connection FOC in the student flat rent, but they can upgrade to 100Mbit for £10pm 3. The latest ones we are putting in have a 300Mbit connection on a 1Gbit bearer with full security and firewalling too as part of a managed service. Thanks Dave

The important thing for any real time end to end service is can your isp guarantee end to end bandwidth over its network to the sip server or hosted pbx If not then be very careful as you could create yourself a whole world of pain. I don't mean doing a bit of qos on the perimeter firewall either. True network level qos / bandwidth guarantee is the proper way to do it. We for example create a completely separate vlan for voice and prioritise this over any other traffic at a network level all the way back to our sip severs / hosted platform. Ta Dave

thanks @Mark182 and @mikeyw @Chuckster we do all you require and more. I'll send you a PM Thanks Dave

MS have allowed Gary's IP range within a few hours so that problem was fixed pretty quickly. We've also changed our processes when adding new ip ranges which have never been routed to actively contact MS prior to giving the ips out to customers. I think it's more MS being super cautious when trying to prevent spam as spammers often try and spoof ip addresses. Thanks and glad it's sorted. Dave

FYI all after speaking with Gary (a very nice chap) we've found that its not the fact that the IP's were purchased from Romania. It's a Microsoft problem as the IP's have never been used before and effectively their mail server didn't trust them. There's many examples of this on Microsoft TechNet and other sites happening to other ISP's using new IP ranges. Gary and Schools BB are in touch to get MS to sort their mailservers out. Thanks all Dave

1. As we have severed our ties with a former supplier who badly let us down and I have no faith in not trust. Those IP's were effectively leased from them so they are to be handed back so they can have no influence on our network. Please not all of our customers are effected. Only a small subset of them. 2. That's no good. During recent surveys the vast majority of our customers are happy. I'll send you a PM and you can chat to me personally as I always want to listen and help our where I can. Thanks Dave

Hi folks, yes the latest block we purchased was from Romania. I'm sure you're all aware that RIPE has run out so instead of getting them for free I've just had to purchase a big block of them. We have updated RIPE and numerous geo location providers of the new location in the UK. Some geo location providers take a little while longer to update their databases which is why this issue has occurred. It doesn't happen to every site, only select ones but it will disappear shortly. Thanks Dave

Hi Matt, we're still in discussions with Lightspeed as we have multiple ways of doing this all which impact customers in a different way and with over 1,000 schools we have to get it right first time and give a clear and consistent message. Please have patience and we'll send through the official channels. Thanks Dave

well at our new office before we have the 100Mbit leased line installed we've got one of our FTTC's which has a sync speed of 63.3Mbit down and 19.7Mbit up and we're getting the below so pretty happy with that Speedtest.net by Ookla - My Results Dave

@Marshall_IT try a different server as that's not normal! Dave

@IrritableTech there are some big changes coming and every filtering product in the world will be effected. We'll have a statement out next week regarding our Lightspeed implementation. A lot of providers are going to have a lot of problems Dave

Fortigates are great as a firewall and fast as grease lightning! The 300D is quite a meaty box though and we'd only install on a leased line of over 300mbit and 2000 users +. The mk2 100D's are fine for most secondary schools. Dave

@mats any ISP that guarantees you speed on a standard FTTC line from BT is lying. BT's SLA to communication providers is "We guarantee a minimum of 12Mbit of speed for 90% of the time during the busiest 3 hour period". That's it......... The only way to guarantee speeds is use full GEA-FTTC or EoFTTC which gives a minimum speed guarantee of xyz all day every day. This is more expensive though and I think at the moment we are the only ISP that offers this as standard on our higher end packages although I could be wrong. If you need any more tech info let me know. Good luck Dave

Remember though if you VPN back to the school and your filtering device is onsite then its likely to bounce all traffic to the school then back out again to the tablets. So if your school is on an ADSL (slow upload speed) then you can near enough forget it. If your content filtering services are in a data centre (ala ours and most LA's) then they will be on high speed 1Gbit or 10Gbit links so it shouldn't effect the speed at the school. Dave

We're a Lightspeed ISP partner and have a similar configuration to some LA's that also have the product. We offer what you're after as standard to all customers. All you need to do is configure the global proxy on your Ipads / tablet to point to the proxy on the Lightspeed devices and hey presto you can get the same content filtering offsite as you can onsite. Suggest you speak with your LA. Dave

Technically yes we can but it's not a standard product yet. Pm if you want some details or give me a call on the office number. Dave

yup, I've had a paper from my techs. I've been away most of last week and this Monday so watch this space. Dave

Hi @FN-GM, we have dozens of leased lines with Virgin Media Wholesale which we take layer 2 and interconnect them into our own ISP network. We. just like many customers find the service is good once its in, but getting it in, oh my lord.......... in our experience rarely does anything go in on time and getting answers can be getting like blood from a stone. Then there's billing which I won't even go into as I'd likely be bared due to the "colourful" language I'd use. Generally we only use them if the site is already connected with Virgin Media fibre and the price is much better than a BT based circuit. Otherwise we use a BT EAD LA circuit wherever possible. I generally find Virgin good on pricing with 200Mbit+. Thanks and good luck. But if you want a quote again from us do let me know Dave

in fact I'm pretty sure its now fixed as we can resolve the domains again and all sites appear to be up

Hello, one of our suppliers has an issue with their auth name servers which is having a few knock on effects to us and a small number of clients. We expect this to be resolved very shortly. Thanks Dave

Morning @Edu-IT, @synaesthesia and @mtayloronline Just to confirm this isn't all HTTPS sites at all. The vast majority still get the blocked page. Its a rather complex issue that involves the SSL protocol, wildcard certificates and new interpretations of how these are implemented on certain sites when using filters in a layer 2 bridge mode (as we do by default as using layer 2 bridge has lots of advantages over a filter in proxy mode). My current understanding is that this isn't just a Lightspeed issue and is effecting multiple vendors. I've one of my senior NOC engineers writing a technical white paper on the issue which I should have by the end of the day and will post once completed. Thanks Dave

All DSL & FTTC services are now fully restored. If you're not online please reboot your router. A full service report will be sent to you as soon as we have the intricacies from our carriers. Thanks David

PM'd Matt, ref HTTPS issues this is only on certain wildcard SSL certificate spanning multiple domains. It is not for every SSL site. All filtering companies are constantly playing cat and mouse with certain websites as they change things and blocking gets more and more difficult. Your issue is logged with Lightspeed who are our filtering vendors and they are looking into a resolution for you. And as promised you'll have heard from Carole David

yes we've had better. Just had a call from our carrier account manager apologising profusely too. The replacement router blade hardware hasn't made a difference so a full reboot of a metro core node is currently in progress. This issue is affecting over 200,000 DSL and FTTC circuits. We'll keep on updating you via the official channels. Most circuits are up just running slowly. Just to make you all fully aware this isn't an issue with our network, rather a carrier interconnect and their equipment. We've actually weathered a 5Gbit DDoS today too for good measure.... Thanks for your patience. Dave