SchoolsBroadband

Morning folks. We are currently investigating. Initial thoughts are we may have an issue with a Fortigate cluster which has numerous inlines connected to it. So it will effect a subset of customers. This is still tbc though. Please see the hub for latest updates. Dave

Technical Pre - sales engineer Salary: £35,000 - £45,000 + Bonus + Car Location: Work from home + travel to customers Talk Straight / Schools Broadband is a leading telecommunications and Internet Service Provider to the business and education market in the UK. We use our own network to deliver business critical services including Cloud, Voice Services, Connectivity, Security and Content Filtering. We are currently recruiting for an enthusiastic and technically competent pre - sales engineer to help the company during a significant period of growth. * Design ICT and network solutions for our corporate, SME and education sector customers from a technical perspective * Assist account managers with technical queries from existing and potential clients * Assist account managers with solution design and pricing for existing and potential clients using the following technologies WAN / LAN / VPN / OSPF / VLAN / VPLS / MPLS / Data centre hosting / Internet / wireless / Email / Storage / Virtualisation / BT WLR3 / BT 21CN (including Microsoft Visio network diagrams, FortiAP wireless solutions etc) *Attend internal and external customer meetings and conference calls with Sales Account Managers, or on your own as required. * Work with your counterparts from our vendors and telco’s to help design and correctly specify technical solutions as per the above * Attend and present or speak at events in conjunction with the Sales Director and account management team in front of numerous potential clients demonstrating and talking about why potential customers should buy our products. These may be based anywhere in the UK. * Technically vet and investigate new technology / products to sell as part of the new customer product life cycle * Attend key vendor events to keep us one step ahead of the competition by being able to see what technology our customers should be using in the future to benefit them and our business * Help technically train and create a training program for our Schools Broadband wholesale partners and our own Internal Account Managers Training: * Comprehensive training on our new products and technology will be provided including vendor accreditation * The challenges and opportunities faced at work will contribute to learning; a large amount of the training will be on the job Knowledge and experience required: * Ideal, Cisco CCNA / CCDA, Fortinet FCNSA (or equivalent) * Desirable, Cisco CCNP / CCDP, Fortinet NSE4 *Consistent strong academic record *Team player with excellent verbal and written communication skills *Willingness to learn with a positive and professional attitude Desirable knowledge and experience: *Confident working in a customer facing role *Presentation skills *Technical design skills * commercial awareness *Any previous hands on technical experience is desirable Our passion for technology and “doing the right thing” by our customers ensures we have the best staff and the best solutions in our market place for the benefit of our customers. Benefits include holiday allowance, matched contribution pension scheme, car allowance and sales commission. If you're interested please send me a PM or email me at [email protected]

Most people have taken notice of the comms which is good news. Our call desk has been busier than normal this morning but this hasn't been the doomsday event some people had said it would have been, far from it. Thank you for everyone that took notice and proactively made the changes to ensure your service continued as normal. Dave

The DFE advises that everyone should have a backup line. 4G isn't always great but is cost effective and is of course better than nothing if your primary line fails. If you do use 4G then I'd recommend putting application control and QOS profiles on the 4G to ensure it doesn't "melt" if you were to put all school traffic down it. In testing we've had around 250Mbps using 5G although you can't still get it everywhere. We advise all schools to take FTTC or 4G as backup depending on what their primary connection is. Thanks Dave

Hello yes it is so long as you are using SSL decryption. I note you're in London? I think LGFL only do SSL decryption on Google and nothing else. @PaddyNewman should be able to advise? If you're using us then we can definitely do this so please call the support desk and they'll help you out. Thanks Dave

you are 100% right. if you test speeds in the day time there will always be background traffic so you'll never get the full speeds out of your line at that time. Dave

If you use a speedtest server not on our network then that should give you some comfort. Another way is to get torrenting and try download something like some large ISO images from educational establishments or some linux distributions as they're generally on very fast links. You'll then make lots of connections all over the place which should eventually start maxing out your line if you have enough sessions open. I can guarantee we do no throttling what so ever on our network! Finally you may also want to look at what port(s) you connect on with different speedtest servers as this could also have an effect. Thanks Dave

Hi folks, this issue should now have been resolved as Google has updated their lists following our submission. Thanks Dave

We recommend speedtest.net We have our own speedtest server you can select but you can also use others ones hosted by other ISPs. Dave

For some reason Google has decided that one of our domains is potentially deceptive (lord knows why...) We've submitted the site for review with Google to mark it as clear and are looking at some alternative interim fixes. To my knowledge it shouldn't effect browsing to allowed sites. Thanks Dave

Hiya, we specialise in multi-site solutions and give you a WAN as standard with firewall and filtering included if you wish. We've also been delivering hosted VoIP solutions for 12 years so consider ourselves experts in that field. Happy to send you a no obligation quote too and get you a call with one of our lovely tech people to discuss how it all works. Thanks Dave

Hi there, thanks for considering us. On top of our Fortigate firewalls we also use Corero Smartwall Anti-DDoS protection for all of our customers free of charge which further enhances our offering against volumetric and application attacks. Most other providers charge for this kind of service but we include FOC in our packages and its been highly successful at mitigating attacks since we installed it some years ago. Thanks Dave

Nationally I can assure you that's not the case. I think you're going to see a lot of positive changes over the next few years with a lot more FTTP. On the RGC scheme we had one school with ECC's of £60,000 for FTTP which the DFE fully paid for. A soon as I hear more from my contacts at the DFE I'll let you know. I've a meeting with them again soon to discuss this specifically. Thanks Dave

@msi_school for a secondary school no. But if you have nothing else available i.e. no FTTC or very poor ADSL then it may still be better than nothing. I'd recommend an FTTC as a minimum, ideally FTTP. It all depends on what you have available. We have some schools now taking 2 x leased lines from different carriers rather than FTTC backup. I do think that FTTP backup is sufficient though when available. The best way to ascertain is to look at your existing usage stats which your ISP should be able to give. You should be able to see your increase in traffic over the past xyz years (depending how long you've been with them) which will help you plan as to what will be sufficient for you. You'll have budget constraints and also technical constraints of course as to what type of backup connection you can afford / is available. 5G may be ok depending on the availability of it for you as a short term backup as I've seen speeds in the hundreds of Mbps in various locations. Also look at implementing specific QOS / application control profiles when the backup kicks in. This allows you to be prepared for if a backup scenario is invoked and teachers have access to certain mission critical applications such as SIP or MIS. I'd also recommend testing this out of hours and if you can generate traffic to mimic what would happen so you can see if your QOS / application control profiles work. Finally SD-WAN is becoming more commonplace and we should have a solution for this later on in the year so you can use numerous connections in tandem to further your throughput. I hope that helps but if you've any questions do reply or send me a PM. Thanks Dave

Hi @localzoo the DFE and government have actually been doing quite a lot of rural areas and funding "outside in" for the primary schools. Most of the near 500 schools connected via RGC were rural / had very poor FTTC. I expect to see the same again with the next incarnation for it specifically because they are normally provided for. Thanks Dave

We provide a lot of 4G as an emergency backup which doesn't cost the earth. Dave

The DFE do mean a full 1gbps up and down for secondary schools. Eofttp is available with near enough the same sla as an ead based leased line. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure there will be a new synchronous fttp from BT Openreach in the not so distant future (just as numerous other fttp providers already do synchronous). Looking at our stats of the 2,000 or so schools we look after is to take fttp whenever you can get it as it comes in at a great price / performance point. Dave

Hi everyone, I've personally been on a steering committee in conjunction with the DFE at setting standards for broadband speeds so I'm very happy that the government is going to intervene and get fibre to the vast majority of schools around the UK in that timeframe. Schools Broadband were part of the initial RGC project where a few hundred rural schools had FTTP installed via predominantly BT Openreach and the DFE / DCMS picked up the ECC charges. We connected over 50 schools using this project. There is a replacement project for this about to be launched later this year where schools will be specifically targeted by the DFE saying they can get a free upgrade to FTTP which I'm hoping we'll be part of again. DCMS has numerous ways of getting schools upgraded to fibre, some of this is LFFN, some of this is done off councils own backs and some of it will be similar to RGC. Either way its great that they are doing this. We've seen some huge improvements for rural schools whose broadband was terrible in the past. Well done DCMS and DFE I say and I look forward to see what else is coming later this year. If anyone has terrible broadband and needs an upgrade to FTTP let me know as I've contacts at the DFE where I can put your schools name forward. Dave

All fibre is dark until you put equipment on the end of it and light it up. That's all BT, Virgin and any fibre provider do as well your LA. I'm with everyone else on here. A 25 year contract to use the same carrier?! No Way. There's loads of carriers investing all over the UK at the moment which gives you choice, particularly when you're in a city which I believe you are. The new DFE guidance says that FTTP is fine for a primary school. It will also be much more cost effective. I also see BT Openreach and Virgin offering 100Gbps EAD Ethernet / leased lines in the not too distant future. They're effectively going to be binning 100Mbps very shortly too and incentivising ISPs to take 1Gbps or 10Gbps bearers (just watch 10Gbps prices go down in the next 12 months too). I'm pretty sure if we or any other ISPs on here offered 25 year contracts to our customers we wouldn't have any! Virgin and Cityfibre already offer Dark Fibre connections which we and other ISPs can buy wholesale. BT Openreach do too but only i certain more rural areas. None of them tie ISPs or end customers into 25 year contracts.... Dave

evening @paulkerton. @PaddyNewman is correct (thanks btw). We have also seen similar things happen to BBC when a user from a specific IP tries to use a VPN. This is not a Schools Broadband thing but a Google / website thing. Another way around it in part is to give your BYOD network a different outgoing IP from the rest of the school if the use of a VPN comes from this network (assuming you have byod on a different VLAN?) You can also track via the Fortigate and Netsweeper logs who is trying to use some types of VPN via various means which we can help you with to an extent if you are struggling to hunt down the culprit. e.g. IP endpoint, URL's etc I'm also assuming your school has its own external IP for all web traffic? Some of our school share for different legacy reasons but we do have numerous schools on their own IP. Please so send me a PM and I'll go escalate for you. Thanks Dave

With the fact that BT Openreach are rolling out FTTP like there's no tomorrow and there's also plenty of other altnets installing all over the UK I wouldn't recommend signing your school up to a 25 year deal. Ok maybe it could be great for you in the short term but when FTTP is available from another provider you could end up paying a lot more for the rest of the term even if you can switch ISP after 5 years. I'll send you a PM and will offer to see what other options you have available to you and which altnets and when BT Openreach have committed to roll-out FTTP (if they have at all). Dave

Morning everyone. We believe this issue is now resolved following maintenance last night. We are watching traffic profiles and lt2p distribution ramp us as expected. We will keep monitoring. Please see the hub maintenance notification for further updates. Dave

Evening @snagrat possibly yes but not for everyone. I'll send you a PM tomorrow with an update but do keep an eye on the portal. Thanks Dave

Hello folks, following the work last week we've been investigating and collating evidence from some customers and have discovered an issue with balancing of L2TP sessions which has affected some of our DSL platform. This has had a knock on effect to some customers with DSL backup as well as per the issue @cullingsh has mentioned. Remedial work is being conducted this evening to resolve the issue. @paulkerton we haven't seen any issues with Virgin as the backhaul carrier but I will send you a PM to discuss. Thanks Dave

Morning @Wirral_Wonderer we're a Fortinet house so naturally would recommend their solution. Forticloud comes FOC with the Fortinet devices we sell as we're an accredited Fortinet MSSP. We also have a hosted version of the advanced analytics package FortiAnalyzer which gives you a huge amount of reporting power. So you can buy an onsite box and then export all of your logs to this service. Finally if you are also looking at connectivity we also have our virtualised Fortigate appliance which sits in the cloud in front of our connectivity and is extremely cost effective and can be spun up straight away. Thanks Dave