SchoolsBroadband

Hello everyone! As the sponsor of this forum I thought I'd let you know that this year we are at BETT stand D322. We'll also be running a competition for any primary school to have our gold service offering completely FOC for 1 year. If a secondary school wins we'll offer a credit of £3,600 against any leased line / Fortigate service. I'd personally love to meet as many fellow Edugeekers on our stand. We'll be showing quite a lot of stuff including MDM for Ipad / IOS Application control and security Content filtering Office 365 New broadband technologies including FTTP and GEA-FTTC/P All you have to do to enter is to be "scanned" by one of the nice people on our stand. Thanks and good luck at winning the free broadband!!! Dave

Hi, when you say you can traceroute with your phone do you mean using its 2G / 3G network or wirelessly via your Talk Talk Internet connection? It does sound like a Talk Talk routing issue between them and the hosting provider. Keep on pressing them and hopefully you'll get through eventually. If not then change ISP or bounce via another server elsewhere on the Internet

I don't want much just to meet all your lovely people Although it would be nice to find some IT partners in the south east!

Hello everyone, we're moving a number of schools away from CLEO at the moment to our broadband services. All of our schools have received termination fee's from OneConnect. I've read the t's and c's and it appears they can charge what ever they want. I'm wondering if any schools have challenged the termination fee and have had any success of not paying them? Certainly in my opinion they don't seem to be fair. One primary school was quoted >£1500 to pick up and decommision equipment. Thanks Dave

Hi Simon, we'd love to come but I suspect it may be a little too late ref broadband due to all the contracts needing to be resigned for another year starting March. Happy to pop up and show you our other wares though. Thanks Dave

Can your ISP not just tell you this? On the Fortinet devices we use its a piece of cake as you can see bandwidth by per IP address on your LAN and this easily shows which machine is the culprit and also what type of traffic they are using. Otherwise SNMP monitor your switch ports as @Geoff recommends

PM'd......

Have you any idea what kind of filtering LGFL uses? I must admit that sounds pretty bad..... Many types of firewall can enforce google safesearch (and other search engines equivalent) even if the user logs in and turns it off), Fortinet, Smoothwall etc all do this. Perhaps to get around the poor filtering you should consider putting another device onsite? I know our Fortinets can work in transparent mode so you don't even have to do any network reconfigurations. Not sure about Smoothwall, best ask @TomNewton Thanks Dave

To see if its a proxy issue I'd suggest do the following. open up a command prompt and type "ping -t 8.8.8.8" This will send constant ping / hello requests to googles public DNS servers. If it continues to reply at the same time that your Internet appears to stop working then it's likely to be a proxy issue. if it says "request timed out" then there's definitely something up with routing / devices between you and google. You could also try ping the councils gateway at the far end of your router. If you do the following command you can work out an internal IP address to ping within the council network but off your schools site "tracert 8.8.8.8" Good luck! Dave

Hi again, sorry for the late reply we've been selling broadband in Oxfordshire At the moment we don't have any pricing details or info on if a standard FTTC can be ugpraded to the special GEA FTTC. Sorry I can't be of much more help at the moment but this new product is literally hot off the press. I'm hoping to have more info by the end of the week / middle of next week. Best send me a PM with your details and I'll get in touch as soon as I know some pricing and have some more definitive products specs. if anyone else is interested on going on a trial at a very good price then do let me know! Thanks Dave

An SSL VPN will do the trick with mapped drives

Hi folks, I know it needs to be taken out of Group Policy which our engineers do as standard on site. I believe we've found the issue on CC4. The guys in the office will be able to help so do send them an email or give them a call on 0 11 33 222 333 Thanks Dave

Hi there, FTTC is great for most primary schools. I've written a big post on this topic before but as always I can't find it FTTC is an "up to" service. BT will only commit to ISP's such as ourslves and others a guaranteed speed of 12Mbit of download for 95% of the time during the busiest 3 hour peak period. You can pay a bit more and get elevated best efforts which increases this to 16Mbit download. We put this on as standard on all connections. it's important to understand that BT will generally be able to provide much faster speeds than this to the ISP and generally do although we sometimes see slow down from them when their network is busy. BT sell FTTC to us by charging us for the bandwidth we use over our pipe into them. This is not charged on the bandwidth uploaded / downloaded, but the maximum speed over the pipe when all connections are aggregated. e.g. if we peak at say 208Mbit over our pipe then BT will charge us £x per Mbit. There is no contention ratio as such on the pipes, it's about managing your users and spreading your bandwidth effectively. Anyone can sell FTTC for next to nothing but massively contend their pipes into BT. No ISP will tell you what this is though. In my opinion it's about managing expectations and giving a good level of service. EFM is good and gives guaranteed bandwidth but is much more expensive that FTTC. We do though have a new product which is about to be launched and we are looking for trialists. It's a 1:1 contention FTTC known as GEA FTTC. It's effectively a leased line and guarantees bandwidth from BT back to us and is not delivered with all of our other normal FTTC users so we can do a true 1:1 end to end FTTC. let me know if you're interested and I could possibly get you on the trial. Also FTTP on demand will be here as of April next year which will gives speeds of up to 330Mbit. This will be expensive though. If you've any more questions do let me know. Thanks Dave

I've just upgraded and for day to day usage I haven't seen that much difference. Still there's plenty of time to take a looksy. Dave

Well I'm not going to lie I am a little. Despite us continuosuly emailing and calling every school that are using our service in EMBC I'm worried some still haven't done anything. Still we're here to help and ready and waiting to make everything work. Just give us a call if you've lost your emai / DNS and we'll pressure EMBC / Capita to get it sorted straight away. Thanks Dave

This varies quite a lot depending on the nature of the school and how they embrace technology and the Internet. Generally a 10Mbit DSL should suffice, but when schools have faster FTTC they do burst over 20Mbit quite regularly. 2Mbit LA and 4Mbit LA MPF / SDSL connections are really not enough for primary schools if they are reasonable users. Are you one of our school in Leicestershire? If so PM me and I'll send you over your bandwidth stats. Thanks Dave

We find most secondary schools average about 46Mbit during the daytime when on 100Mbit lines. Some larger ones peak about 80Mbit. I can see this going up and up over the next few years though

to get a true speed test I'd recommend disconnecting everything except for a laptop from your Cisco router to ensure nothing else is using any of the bandwidth and then re-test. Also try a couple of speedtest.net servers as sometimes they can be overloaded. Good luck!

Hi there, look at getting either a Foritgate 80C or 100D. They will both do the job. You will though need an ADSL modem as the Fortigates don't come with an ADSL port on board (neither does you 110C for that matter). Balancing will not give you double the speed in one single download / upload. Instead it will spread user requests over both lines. Bonding will give you double the speed in one single download / upload. This is more expensive to do. We do bonding in the UK and in theory could do the same in Italy via our hosted bond in our UK data centre but this would add a bit of latency and may not be ideal for you. If you need any advice do let me know. Thanks Dave

An ipsec dial-in will be fine. The Draytek comes with software that makes it nice and easy or you can use mac / windows vpn dial-in tool. The Draytek 2830 is fine if you have ADSL or cable or leased line as it's got 2 x WAN ports. Get the N version if you want wireless too. We sell them btw so if you want me to get you one do give us a call Thanks Dave

Hi folks, an interesting thread. I would seem sensible to me that when the TAG moves that all associated DNS entries are also removed from the ISP as it no longer resides with them. I know we do this if a domain leaves us otherwise the above happens. Thank you for pointing this out @synaesthesia . We're now getting in touch with all schools to make sure they've done the same. Dave

ha that PDF made me laugh. There's nothing like a bit of scaremongering!

Well I think it's obvious who I'd recommend Even if you didn't use us for a school I think it's important to have an all inclusive service rather than buy your line from company x and your content filtering / security from company y but it does also depend on how competent you think you and your engineers are at managing a security service. Look for the following / ask the following questions What SLA does the company offer? If it doesn't hit its SLA what compensation do you get? (you'll generally find your LA won't give you any. We for example give you 1 day credit for every hour of downtime) Highly recommend an ADSL / FTTC backup in case of fibre or EFM failure Hosting of your .sch.uk domain name (or other) Backup MX as standard. This is particularly useful if you have your own mail server onsite What was BECTA approved content filtering. If its newer than when BECTA was about make sure the company / vendor of the device is part of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). Without this your head may be very nervous about moving away What are the costs to upgrade your service in the future if you require faster speeds? I'd highly recommend an onsite firewall / content filtering device for a secondary school as this will give you much more control. Fortigate / Smoothwall / Watchguard / Cisco will all do the job Ensure you get reports on web activity. It's no good to just block sites, you really need to report too and really by username, not just by IP address of the device. Again your head will like this Integration of a firewall with Active Directory makes your life so much easier Make sure you understand what happens in the event of hardware failure on all equipment provided by the ISP e.g. router, firewall Remote VPN login for staff is extremely useful. Often the LA may need to use this if you still use them for any services so they can access your LAN. We've some LA's that do remote dial-in and others that have asked for a static IPSEC VPN back to their offices. Spam filtering is very useful The ability to filter devices offsite as well as onsite. We find lots of schools are giving Ipads to children and need to content filter when not in school Does the ISP specialise in the delivery of services to schools? I believe you get a lot of value add by the ISP understanding a schools needs. If you just want a fast Internet connection then fine you can go anywhere. If you want advice on how the services provided by the ISP can help you as a school then go to a specialist company as you'll get a lot more value add Don't go for more than a 3 year contract period. Unless you use BT fibre on a bearer of 1Gig or over, there is no cost advantage to the ISP. Therefore there's no real reason for the pricing to be different between a 3 year and a 5 year contract except for the ISP tying you in for longer which is of benefit to them.

I'd be really interested on hearing any feedback ref this. There seems to be a lot of wifi / wimax / 4g companies popping up offering fast connections at good prices.

Hi there, this is something we're developing at the moment. I'm hopeful to have it ready and a few more tasty new product start of December. Essentially though as we're an O2 wholesale partner we can white label their sims and voice / data airtime, combined with content filtering and mobile device management. So we'll be able to content filter any device whether onsite or offsite. This can be using ADSL, FTTC, Leased Lines, bonded, 3G, 4G (coming soon too!) Ta Dave