SchoolsBroadband

I would have thought that would be fine. Just make sure you can run QOS on your perimeter firewall to prioritisation any time sensitive applications. Dave

Hi Stuart, this is something we can do for you including line, Lightspeed filtering, management, Fortinet security, vpn, mobile device management etc etc starting from £2,600pa for our bronze FTTC 40Mbit service. you could get your own filtering and then work with someone like BT or Virgin directly but we find most primary schools like the fully managed service so one point of contact for everything. Cheers Dave

I'd recommend an O2 / Be based connection as they come with unlimited data packages. Entanet offer a wholesale version of O2 via any of their Visps that have already been listed above. You should be able to get one for about £20pm + VAT. I have an O2 based ADSL 2+ Annex M at home which is pretty good. I did move from a BT based one though and find that it's not quite as good on my Draytek 2830 as the BT one was speed wise. But still its unlimited so it doesn't really matter. Dave

I'm loving my new HTC One. The screen is brilliant and the new HTC user interface is pretty cool too HTC One Overview - HTC Smartphones Dave

4 years or not, the ICT4 Leeds offering is still nearly double that of commercial providers for the same speed circuit for secondary schools. The larger providers (us, RM, Exa I'm sure will still be here in 3 years time. Take a look at their / our trading past. The biggest thing I still here from schools is the poor service they've had for the past number of years. They are leaving just as much because of this as they don't believe ICT4Leeds / LLN can provide them with a good service due to their track record. That's not me saying that just to put down ICT4Leeds, that's the schools themselves. Just see earlier in the thread of search on the board.....

are you and they able to SNMP monitor the outgoing port? Or a switch connected to the outgoing port? Quite often you may find that you are actually maxing out the line. 40Mbit is a bit on the slow side for a secondary school now. Dave

Yes it was a good document. Perhaps a bit too much for primary schools though as some of its quite technical. If you really know what you're doing then you could go it alone with BT using FTTC. Of course I'm slightly biased in saying you should choose an ISP specific for the education market as they understand what schools need and will offer much more specific support that I believe Schools need than you'd ever get from BT or another big ISP. Also you've got one point of contact for everything. Your DNS, Internet connection, anti-virus, remote VPN, domain hosting, content filtering and e-safeguarding etc etc. We find generally most primary schools go for a package with either us or another specific provider. Happy to answer any questions if you put them here or via a PM. Thanks Dave

Generally speaking no. We have different options available and the cost also changes dependant on if you're a primary or a secondary school. If you're a primary schools I'd recommend FTTC anyway as it will near enough always outperform a 10Mbit leased line and prices for that including content filtering start from £2,600pa. Thanks Dave

What do you have set as your DNS server when you go out of the Palo? Does what ever it is also have it's default gateway set to be the Palo and does it also have upstream DNS servers it uses? Dave

We've got a coverage of about 85% of the UK for between £8,495 to £8,995 for a full 100Mbit using BT based circuits with even better pricing in London. We've also managed to do 100Mbit on 1Gbit bearer on Virgin from £5,995 in certain areas. Beating BT Retail on price is unbelievably easy for us or our friends at M247. It's very rare we're beaten on price for connectivity so do give us a go Dave

We have a wholesale account with Virgin Media and essentially connect their leased line Ethernet network into ours. Virgin is very good once its in. Getting it in is another matter though..... Do send me a PM if you'd like a quote. Cheers Dave

Likewise, we've moved a number of schools over from OCL / CLEO already and happy to provide anyone with a quote that wants one as well as our account managers coming to see you. Dave

Hello everyone, Do you want to work with the UKs leading commercial provider of broadband services to schools in the UK? If so working from Schools Broadband could be the job for you! As we continue to expand we require 2 x additional 1st Line Support engineers. One junior and one senior. Your role will initially be desk based (although once trained we may also send you to site to customer installations) in our office in Ilkley, near Leeds, West Yorkshire. You will be required to Answer queries from school in a technical manner and log within our CRM / Ticketing system Provisioning of services (firewall, filtering, email, hosting, domain, hosted VoIP, SIP Trunking, mobile device management) Make amendments to existing customer installations Liaise with our 3rd line network engineers to resolve complex issues Work with leading our deployment of hundreds of individual and now hosted Fortigate Firewall solution Liaise with 3rd party suppliers regarding faults Site installation of new broadband and security services The ideal candidate will Be able to communicate complex technical issues in an easy to understand manner over the phone Have at least 1 years experience of configuring firewall rules Understand VPN technologies Understand VoIP Understand common network and security issues in an education environment Understand network technologies 9 hours per day with 1 hour for lunch. Times are dependent on a shift rota with the full working day being 08:00 - 18:00. Out of hours work may be required from time to time. Salary is £18,000 - £24,500 depending on experience. Career progression path to Systems / Network engineer possible. Please email your cv's to [email protected] All submissions required no later than midday on 21st June 2013. Thanks Dave

Yes, can you believe it, it was thunderstorms in Nice when we landed whilst in Manchester glorious sunshine......

+ 1 for Fortinet here. I'm currently at their Fast & Secure conference in Cannes, France. I hear the weather in Leeds is just as nice as here which is frustrating!! FYI I'm going to have quite a few refurb units in the next 12 months as we move people over to our hosted Fortinet platform.....

I'd also recommend doing a pathping command. This essentially does a traceroute (tracert) but also sends loads of ping packets to each hop along the way to the destination. You should be able to tell from here at what point the issue is happening along the link and if its the LA or something local. it'll also show you if there are any lost packets. Dave

I'm not going to say as I know other ISPs read this too. All I will say is that LLN reckoned it would keep 80% of its schools. I suspect this is going to be more like 35%. I'm sure you can do the maths

Happy birthday!

I'd suggest speaking with suppliers existing customers. We've had schools in Leeds happily using our service for about a year now with glowing reviews. Happy to pass on their contact details if you'd care to send me a pm? Nobody is perfect. Problems do happen and in my opinion the mark of a company is what happens when a customer does have an issue. Again the best thing to do is speak with the suppliers existing customers. Still we often here problems with LAs where simple things such as port forwarding can take weeks to do when it should be a 10 minute job. At the end if the day if the LA has been providing a good service, thus their customers are happy and it's for a reasonable price then schools will stay where they are and we do see this in some parts of the country. If the service in the schools view has been poor or it's over priced then hey will leave. Regarding Leeds, I think the poll on this forum and the number of schools that have signed up to our service or our competitors speaks volumes on what they think of the service they've received and the new service offering from LLN.

Actually we have tertiary agreements with some carriers (and I expect other companies do also) so your service would continue anyway. In essence if we (or any other company) went bust that delivered broadband services to schools then they'd go into administration and would be bought by another company as organisations that are backed up by the tax payer (i.e. won't go bust themselves) are a valuable asset to have on a companies client base. Certainly if any of you know of any companies that are in this situation do let me know as I'd buy them! A very good point by @sted too

You are absolutely 100% correct @moderator we know of a few companies I wouldn't recommend touching with a barge poll both technically and financially. At the end of the day though it is down for the school to decide and dictate who they use, not us, another ISP or the LA. FYI for all those wondering we have a Creditsafe UK credit rating of 94/100 (100 being the best). Happy to send anyone a copy if they require it. Thanks Dave

£2k does seem like quite a lot to do a survey and produce a report. Certainly we're nowhere near that/ We sometimes charge for surveys depending on the location of the school. I.e if we have to send an engineer from our Leeds offices to Swansea (and this does happen) then effectively its an engineer away for the day + travel costs + writing up the report too. If it's within a couple of hours or we have an engineer going nearby then we'll do it for free. There are also other tools that give a good indication of what coverage you can expect. We use the free Fortiplanner software from Fortinet (as we sell their kit). This is quite good and gives you a pretty good indication of coverage so long as you know how thick your walls are and what they are made of. The best thing is that this can be done by us remotely. It still takes a while to do but gives a good indication. Thanks Dave

I think Tribune are Watchguard partners?

I was actually at the UK Internet Service Providers Association seminar on child safety and filtering yesterday in London so this is quite a hot topic at the moment. There are a number of large ISP's that already have a service included for free. These are currently Talk Talk and Sky. I believe BT and Virgin will be joining suit soon. Microsoft were also demonstrating their inbuilt filtering into Windows 8 which looked pretty good. If a school gives Ipads / Laptops / other devices to students or teachers then we can do filtering onsite (at school) / offsite (at home) and give them the same access rights wherever they are by using our hosted Lightspeed MDM and content filtering service. This essentially puts a global proxy payload which points to our Lightspeed content filtering servers. The OpenDNS solution which @Arthur mentions sounds like quite a good way of doing it too. Dave

I was actually at the UK Internet Service Providers Association seminar on child safety and filtering yesterday in London so this is quite a hot topic at the moment. There are a number of large ISP's that already have a service included for free. These are currently Talk Talk and Sky. I believe BT and Virgin will be joining suit soon. Microsoft were also demonstrating their inbuilt filtering into Windows 8 which looked pretty good. If a school gives Ipads / Laptops / other devices to students or teachers then we can do filtering onsite (at school) / offsite (at home) and give them the same access rights wherever they are by using our hosted Lightspeed MDM and content filtering service. This essentially puts a global proxy payload which points to our Lightspeed content filtering servers. The OpenDNS solution which @Arthur mentions sounds like quite a good way of doing it too. Dave