SchoolsBroadband

I'm not sure if that can be done or not. Dan is in Loughborough and then Northamptonshire on Friday so I'll get one of my other techs to look into it for you. Any more feedback is greatly appreciated

Oh yes thanks Glennda I'm aware it's tiny amount of bandwidth. I meant it's very east to saturate your line if you do a big upload / backup and you don't reserve any bandwidth for VoIP calls. Classic example was for myself, I changed my router to test IPv6 from home to a newer model, forgot to put QOS on, call came in via the VoIP phone back to the office, I sent a big visio drawing and my calls were like when you go out of signal on a mobile. Not good! FYI the Drayteks are great routers for home workers, love em.... Dave

Yes stick them on a separate VLAN unless you plan to use the Ethernet pass through ports on them? Also what ever you do please make sure you use QOS on your Watchguard otherwise you'll likely have no ends of problems if someone does a huge upload / download. We've done a lot of VoIP installs so feel free to PM if you want any more technical advice. Dave

Hi Synaesthesia, a little bird told me your new leased line from us today went live but you were ill so couldn't see it in action on its first day?!

Hi there, your schools will have received an information from our support department regarding transferring the TAG of the domain from EMBC to us. This may have gone to your head / bursar and they may not have passed it on. If you call our support department on 01133222333 option 2 they'll be happy to pass the instructions on. Don't worry it's a piece of cake to do and is normally completed within 48 hours after you've sent the email to EMBC requesting the TAG change. Thanks

Pm'd.....

Hello everyone, we have a promo 100Mbit Leased Lines applicable to all orders placed by the end of the year. This is due to a new incentive from one of carrier partners. FREE INSTALLATION*, £9,995PA RENTAL**, FREE AUTO FAIL OVER ADSL BACKUP, FREE CISCO ROUTER This is available to the vast majority of the UK and not just large cities. So if you're a school in the middle of nowhere this could be a great deal for you! 20% OFF ALL FULLY MANAGED FORTINET SECURITY / CONTENT FILTERING DEVICES IF TAKEN AT THE SAME TIME Simply get in touch with us and quote promo code "I LOVE EDUGEEK" * Subject to BT site survey. If you've already got fibre onsite then the free installation will stick. ** Available to 96% of the UK For schools in large urban areas get in touch as we can do even better pricing

I completely agree with twin turbo. A Draytek Vigor will do this for you no problem. If you need help setting it up let me know. Dave

This is something we offer. PM'd

I've heard similar things from quite a few schools in the same area too. Good luck and let me know how you get on.

hmmm sounds a little odd. Sometimes DNS can go a bit screwy and affect the loading of web pages. What do you have set as your DNS server?

Oh FYI we've sold some fibre 10Mbit leased lines for sub £5k in the past. They've come down in cost quite a lot

Hi jimmy, PM me your postcode and I'll get you a quote. You can also do bonded or balanced ADSL. Alternatively give me a call and I'll go over options available. EFM would likely not have any excess construction charges as it's a copper based leased line. It also comes with guarnateed SLA which I suspect is what you need if you're trading from home. Happy to give some advice. Dave

Hi Caffrey, @twin-turbo is right, to do it at an ISP level they have to support MLPPP. This is done on the ISP's LNS and also some special details need to be given in the initial radius session. one of the downsides of MLPPP bonding is that if one of the links is slower than the other(s) then all other links will not be able to run at more than the lowest. e.g 3 x links run at 2Mbit and 1 x link runs at 1Mbit then you'll only get 4Mbit out of the total quad bond. There are other ways to bond that we do which doesn't have this side effect. We have bonded FTTC before and offer this to larger schools. Certainly bonding is great for rural schools, particuarly when they've got no direct BT fibre onsite already. PM me if you'd like info on how to do it and equipment costs

PM'd mate

It was quite interesting to see that Ofcom today claimed that the average UK broadband speed was 9Mbit.

19.6Mbit download and 2.2Mbit upload here on an ADSL2+ Annex M product from my own company I do live about 400m from the telephone exchange which does help!

ah no I meant when the school buys the device and provides it to the pupils or staff to use outside of school. Sorry if I didn't make that clear enough @glennda

yeah they are good products too. The main thing for us is the filtering and if people want it. I believe there's a duty of care to protect children on any device if you supply it to them whether in school or not.

Hello everyone, we're seriously considering investing a large amount of money in a cloud based solution that offers mobile device management of Ipads and Android based tablets. This will also allow the content filtering of all Internet connections via 3G or wifi where ever the device is. i.e pupils / staff can take them home or out on trips. The solution fits into Windows AD so you can have different settings for pupils and staff as well as having advanced reporting, locking of applications and itunes store etc. It's a whole lot more than just offering a proxy setting within Safari. My questions is who out there would be interested in an offering like this and if so what do you think it would be worth paying for on a monthly or annual basis per user? Any feedback from all you lovely people would be great as always! Thanks Dave

Although there has often been quite a bit of RBC / LA bashing, we've found most of them to be quite helpful and released the TAG to us no problem what so ever. EMBC have always responded and done this as per the customers request so I don't think you'll have a problem moving from EMBC to a.n.other provider.

Just my bit but i'd recommend you look for a SIP / leased line provider that can provider guaranteed QOS or a dedicated VLAN across their network back to the SIP softswitch. I've seen a lot of SIP trunks simply not work correctly because there's no guaranteed VoIP prioritisation over the network. Don't get me wrong SIP will work 99% of the time but users will always shout and remember that 1% of time when it doesn't! Ref 999; I'd need to double check but I think Ofcom made it a legal requirement about a year ago that if you deliver outbound calls over SIP if the provider is in the UK then they're supposed to offer breakout to 999 emergency services.

Hi guys, I've heard different things from different schools. Some seem to have bought the Cisco switch where as others need to give it back. I'd suggest asking EMBC. I'd also recommend letting EMBC know you are going to be leaving. GrumbleDook is right, the council are still being helpful to schools in giving advice whether you use us or another provider. Just to let you know if you want to keep a VLAN configuration you can. We've had some schools that flatten their network to one IP range but others that wish to keep separate VLANs. The Fortigates we install are VLAN capable so you don't have to change your network if you don't want to If you've got any specific questions about moving from EMBC to us or to another provider I'd be more than happy to help. Thanks Dave

Actually EFM can go up to 35Mbit via BT Wholesale on an 8pair solution. Talk Talk wholesale also do a 4 pair EFM going up to 16Mbit too

If you're looking for a firewall I'd suggest looking at a member of the Internet Watch Foundation. I believe NEN guidelines says schools should use a filtering service that subscribes to this list. See Members | Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) Vendors you could use are Fortinet, Smoothwall, Sonicwall, websense, lightspeed etc