EXA_Mark

Couldn't agree more. We've just entered our 13th year of providing connectivity and filtering into schools, and look after thousands of schools all over the UK, and we have never felt the need to get into unprofessional attacks. Does that mean that we won't try to get over our benefits over the competition, no of course not, but there are right ways and wrong ways to do it. Nor have we ever felt a need to block our customers from receiving emails from competitors contacting our customers, or pushing out letters to our schools that are full of scare-mongering and massively intentional (I believe) factual inaccuracies, and as for not for profit ventures, it's very easy to see (via companies house) just whether those organisations really are truly not for profit, and are they paying themselves hidden benefits by say pensions or companies cars (not that I am saying this particular company is, just an example). I have kept relatively quiet on here for a few days about this, but there really are some underhand tactics going on, and not from the competitors. Don't get me wrong, this is not the first time I've seen it in my 16 + years of working in the industry,nor will it be the last. After all people are trying to protect their livelihoods. I just have no time whatsoever for the pretense that some organisations claim to be doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. We sell our products at a profit, which we reinvest year on year, & we come to work as individuals to get paid. As do all the companies that sell via organisations such as the LGFL and other "not for profit" companies. All the not for profit means, in these cases is they are not ADDING any extra margin onto the costs they get from their suppliers, except of course to cover things such as salaries, marketing & self promotion, pensions, buildings, running costs and other such things. In fact in many ways the same as most companies, making sure you are not running at a loss. As a company we have and continue to pass on at cost (no margin for us at all) all of the third party products we use, such as Stormshield, Fortinet and various AV options. Does that make us not for profit too? Of course not. The whole point of this thread was about peoples opinions on this particular GFL (and it could be any to be fair), and this somehow got into all of the other bits. The simple fact is, if organisations, such as LGFL offered a brilliant service, at an unbeatable price, there would be no discussion to be had. If they gave the flexibility of contracts, such as one year (as is our standard) so their customers can chose to stay IF they want to, not because they have to, and the service continued to be unmatched, they would have nothing to be concerned about. What there should be is open and fair competition for all. For schools, and other organisations to be able to fairly, and easily, compare offerings, without prejudice and ensure that they get value for money. After all, there is no point paying for all the bells and whistles (beyond what you need) if you are never going to use them. That's just good financial practice surely. Rant done. Apologies to all.

One very obvious question. Do you really want five year contracts? The price of fibre in the past three years alone has nearly halved and Openreach have already committed to further cuts next year too. Whilst the wholesale price of the fibre optic is only one part of the cost, the price drops on 100Mbps and 1Gbps capacity across OpenReach, which is one of the main paths all ISPs use (yes, including Virgin and Talk Talk), has dropped thousands in the past year alone. If you want to ensure you are getting the best value for money I would recommend you do not take a contract longer than three years from ANYONE (us included). And I really wouldn't be concerned at the argument of "well you know that your budget is fixed and prices cannot go up". In 12 years (we've just gone into our 13th year) we have never increased the price of connectivity once (not even by inflation).

Hi Matt, As has already been mentioned below, any Nominet member should be able to host a .sch.uk The domain itself is assigned to each school by nominet to begin with and it is the schools, not the Local Authorities, so you can move it to who ever you like. We look after thousands of .sch.uk domains for our schools, many of who then either use our mail services (included) or we then forward on to services such as Microsoft or Google. If we can be of any help just PM me and I'll get one of our account managers to get in touch and let you know the process.

That's a fair point that I didn't really consider the amount of time you spent re-negotiating. From our perspective because we have never had connectivity or filtering price rises, and customers generally want more bandwidth year on year. Customers just upgrade as and when they need to, rather than waiting to end of contract, or tying themselves into three year extensions; and the re-negotiating really wasn't something I had thought about. Thanks for pointing that out.

I can only speak about this from Exa position, but we've not seen anything, and no unusually high amount of traffic going through to Google/YouTube through the usual internet exchanges and peering. Do bear in mind lots of people are watching the election results this morning and therefore some ISP's may be getting network congestion due to increased streaming (especially the more home user based ISPs). To be clear though, we are not

Firstly, everyone please don't see this as a concealed sales pitch, it isn't. I really would like some genuine feedback from the Edugeek user base. We are finding a significant number of our competitors are moving back to tie schools into three and even five year contracts, and obviously there are some cost reductions to be had (especially on leased lines/private circuits); BUT do you really want to be in a five year contract, even if it did work out about a £500-£1000 a year cheaper than today's cost? Looking back at the past twelve years we have been providing connectivity to schools, the price of leased lines in particular has dropped significantly, in fact forget the past twelve years, the past three years have seen massive changes and we would expect that to continue to do so in the future, especially on the Gbps circuits. I know a lot of finance managers/bursars/offices managers like the security of knowing budgets, as do I, but from our own personal perspective our connectivity charges have never increased (not even by inflation) in 12 years, so that really isn't a reason from our side to do it. We've always been a little bit unique in that our default contracts are one year, and I have always believed that schools preferred that level of flexibility, and if you deliver a great service schools will want to stay and do not need to be forced to stay. However this morning alone I have had six schools get in touch (and it's only 09:47 as I type) that have been offered five year contracts and would like us to offer the same. I have always thought that you should give the customer what they want (if of course you can), but how many of you really want to go back to the bad old days of long term contracts? Of course we can offer longer term, as well as our default, and I guess most likely will, I am just curious as to your opinions. Thanks.

Thank you Chris, As you can imagine, given this is my company, I am always keen to ensure we are doing our best and that the service is working as it should. Also because the product is constantly being updated (as I am sure other filtering services are), we want to make sure that our customers are aware of all the options open to them to get the very best filtering, and safeguarding the children. Safeguarding children, has always been at the heart of what we have done, what we do now, and what we will do in the future. It is the key reason SurfProtect even exists to start with. Rather than just reselling other companies services, such as those mentioned before (Lightspeed/Smoothwall), we developed our own system, which we have complete control and future development over, and our customers are not waiting on a third party releasing updates when/if they notify us of problems or challenges they are facing. Because all our development is done in house, nothing is outsourced at all, this means we can and do run very frequent development updates (in an Agile methodology) to ensure our customers can have their filtering exactly how they want it. My concerns over the comments previously were of a nature that some of the things you were wanting to achieve are standard features of SurfProtect or SurfProtect Fusion, and that you could do them now, without potentially having to spend any more money and still making sure you had the right safeguards in place for your children. I hope you have now managed to speak to MarkD (who posted previously) to ensure you have the filtering how you want it, and you are welcome to come across to our Bingley offices (not that far from Leeds) to speak to the development team in person if you like, and we can give you some in person training on both SurfProtect and SurfProtect Fusion. To be clear this offer is open to any of our schools, and always has been. It's always nice to see a new face or two at the office.

Hi Chris, As per Mark D's post can you please give us a call as the problems you experience can be easily resolved, as they are standard features of the product. And unlike others that are out there, such as Lightspeed we are already well ahead of the game on things such as Google HTTPs. Many of the features you are wanting have been in place for a few years. There is definitely no need for you to consider spending additional money on an expensive firewall and filtering service such as Smoothwall when everything you have mentioned is already in place with SurfProtect and is inclusive at no charge (unlike things such as Lightspeed) with your Exa connection. I am concerned also over the comment that following recent updates you ending up with no filtering. Whilst we do constantly update SP, and have done for 10 + years, If we had run an update on SP that removed filtering altogether we would have thousands of schools calling us. Of course, if you do want to use a third party service, such as Smoothwall, with our connectivity you can use whatever you want, we don't restrict you from doing that, we just don't want to see a customer spending money they may not need to.

Would seem very unlikely that we didn't have customers in those areas if most were affected (given how many thousands we have throughout the UK), but as we don't currently use Talk Talk as a principal wholesale provider for DSL circuits that could be why our customers weren't affected? We do use their infrastructure for leased lines, as well as Openreach and others, and to be fair a pretty good coverage of hundreds of secondary schools that have leased lines in throughout the UK, just surprised they weren't affected, unless of course it was just the DSL side? Have to say TT's network is generally very reliable, so was surprised when I read this. As I said Dave, wasn't a competitor dig this, and I have since since other ISP's who use the Talk Talk DSL platform were affected, so I am guessing it was mainly that side? Looks like there was another outage last night (Friday) too.

Hi, If you'd like to speak to any of our thousands of schools that use us for our connectivity and content filtering from all over the UK, and of course learn from them of the real pro's AND cons of moving away from the LA just PM me and I'll put you in touch with them, most of them are really happy to help other schools out. No sales pitch from us or quote, unless you ask me for one of course

Really Dave? We didn't see any at all (genuinely, not a competitor dig)! Was it just their DSL/EoFTTC traffic affected or the whole side (L/L, EFM)?

I know most of the 170 plus schools that moved to us in Northamptonshire used this document as a guide, as did a lot in Oxfordshire and other areas, so it is a very useful starting point for any school. The Swindon one you refer to does indeed frequent these hallowed forums so I suspect that is how it ended up there.

If you'd like one of our education managers, who've been working in our industry for 15+ years and really do know what they are talking about to come in and help your business manager understand the reality of how this wiill affect the school just let me know, also more than happy to put her in touch with thousands of schools that use us already and for them to talk to other BM's and why they didn't go with that type of service or company.

Unlike Dave, I've never actually met them, but I've worked in the industry for fifteen years, twelve of which I have owned my own ISP, and I've never met them at any ISP event. They are also not members of RIPE https://www.ripe.net/membership/indices/GB.html which is pretty much a forgone requirement if you want to be a true ISP. They could well be a VISP and white labelling another ISP's services, but the best way is to ask them. I can honestly say though (not sure about Dave) that I have never come across them being used in any schools we have been asked to quote for, or provide (and that is thousands). Hope this helps at least a little.

If you'd like to speak to some of the Birmingham schools that have left Link2ICT and been with us for several years already just send me a PM and I'll be happy to put you in touch with them so you can see what our services are like first hand as opposed to just a sales pitch. - - - Updated - - - If you'd like to speak to some of the Birmingham schools that have left Link2ICT and been with us for several years already just send me a PM and I'll be happy to put you in touch with them so you can see what our services are like first hand as opposed to just a sales pitch.

Either Stormshield (Use to be Known as NETASQ) or Fortinet. We have hundreds of these in secondary schools throughout the UK and both are great. If you do decide that either of these suit you we can provide them at a VERY (read zero margin to us) price. Just PM me if you'd like more information.

Hi Jollity, Just sent you a PM with one of our partners who look after lots of schools in Kent. Hope this helps

We have accredited partners all over the UK, who provide support and assistance regardless of the ISP, if you PM me where you are I'll send you over a couple of contacts

And mine too for not noticing the date of the original post. It's late Friday (that is my excuse)

Hi GSK, Like others, we are happy to try and provide you some viable options. And we do offer bonding as an option, in fact we have done since 2003, although to be honest, if you are on long lines (and you sound like you may be), this too brings a different set of problems, especially if you are using MLPPP (most common type) of bonded as you will end up with a combined value of the lowest common denominator of the lines. To clarify, if you had four lines, and three were of 4Mbps and one was of 2Mbps, it would end up bring the other four down to ensure that you didn't get excess packet loss. You should also be aware (I am sure you are) that on bonded DSL 4 x 4Mbps (as an example) does not give you 16Mbps, you generally lose about 20-30% due to overheads, so if you did get 4 x 4Mbps, you would most likely see around 10-12Mbps. There are other options that I think may suit you better that I'm happy to talk about via PM, when it works. Our services also include our own (in house developed) content filtering solution, SurfProtect and we are our in 12th year of providing connectivity and filtering to schools, so our experience in these sort of more challenging solutions may well help.

According to someone in the know Dave, they moved most schools to a CGNAT model last year due to not being able to issue further real world IP addresses and could see the problem escalating, although this is via word of mouth and not first hand from YHGFL so take this with a pinch of salt, just in case! Which if it is right this does seem to make sense. IP V6 anyone how about a /64 with 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IP Addresses. Being serious though, CGNAT is fine for home users (just about) disaster waiting to happen for business or education. For clarification, like most decent education ISP's we give out a block of 8 real world IP's (V4) to anyone needing them, anything above that we look at on a case by case basis, based on current RIPE guidelines.

If you would like a quote for our services, or would like to speak to some of the many thousands of schools that already use us you are most welcome to. We don't just have a few select "champion" schools for you to speak to in order to find out about whether our services are excellent or not, you can speak to any of them. Just PM me if you'd like to speak to them, or get a quote. Exa are in our 12th year of providing connectivity and filtering services (our own, not bought in). Oh yes, and our network uptime for our schools in 2014 was 100%

Everyday for me too, arrive early Tuesday to get set up and then back home late Saturday night. It's going to be a hard work as usual, but it will be fun too.

Hi Kevin, We have some great support and "how to" documents for Vigors as we've been using them since the first 2200USB came out 13 or 14 years ago. If you'd like them just PM me and I'll send them to you directly. Given we have set up and supplied thousands of these to schools over that time we are kind of experts on them, so if you get stuck or just want a bit of advice don't be afraid to ask. Doesn't matter if your not a customer, always happy to help. - - - Updated - - - Hi Kevin, We have some great support and "how to" documents for Vigors as we've been using them since the first 2200USB came out 13 or 14 years ago. If you'd like them just PM me and I'll send them to you directly. Given we have set up and supplied thousands of these to schools over that time we are kind of experts on them, so if you get stuck or just want a bit of advice don't be afraid to ask. Doesn't matter if you're not a customer, always happy to help.

I was about to say the same as Dave (From SB), we have lots of customers who use Drayteks for this. Do you have real world static IP addresses at each site from Virgin? Also (as per Tom SW), most firewalls/utms should be able to support what you are trying to do.