Baerf

Microsoft is releasing their own 365 backup service (how good it is, or costly i don't know): https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-syntex-blog/welcome-to-microsoft-inspire-2023-introducing-microsoft-365/ba-p/3874887

Definitely no doubt that the hardware lasts, i just never believed the price justified the cost (and that includes the support). We replaced the Cisco VOIP with 3CX which i have been extremely happy with.

I'm not convinced that the Cisco wireless was a good solution. If we are talking about Cisco networking (switches, routers etc..) then i would 100% agree, expensive, but definitely up there as top of the range. But their wireless and VOIP solutions (i believe, but could be wrong, that Cisco purchased their wireless / VOIP platforms rather than built from inhouse) I've always considered average at best (we had all 3 solutions together for the best part of 7 years). Meraki is different beast than their Aironet (it was Aironet that we had), but their licensing model just rubs me up the wrong way. Sorry, i'm hijacking the thread.

Honest question, but is the poor wireless experience due to it being Ubi, or is it due to poor design / implementation? I used to install Citrix for a living, and the amount of times i would get comments about how bad Citrix was based on their own experiences (slow being the main culprit), and after a quick look seeing how poorly it has been implemented (or even how bad the underlying network / AD was) it was no wonder they were having a bad experience. I'm not trying to justify our solution, but as mentioned we've had no complaints since it's been installed. The near zero support is a key issue, but equally when we were a Cisco house their TAC support was so expensive, and just awful. We had major issues with an iOS release at the time, and we just couldn't get them to help us - with their line being we had to wait a few months before the next firmware release.

To answer on what i found. We have recently gone down the Ubi route for wireless, we just wanted good wifi, and did not care about Application Control etc... For costs (and we purchased several hundred AP's) we purchased from a vendor and the margins they showed us was tiny - they were making roughly £5 per AP (less than 5%). The reason why we went with Ubi was purely costs. Looking at Ruckus, Meraki Aruba, we were looking at doubling the project cost - maybe even more when taking into account continued support etc (there was still most likely a 5% margin per AP but as Redway states that would have equated to more margin due to high AP cost). Lack of support is a concern for us, we were very clear on this when we started looking at them, and for that we built so that there so no single points of failure. Ubi is in no way the best wireless solution, but it is cheaper if costs are a massive concern (for us it was, we simply only had a certain amount of cash, and a hardset of requirements). We had them in for 4 months now - and had a good experience, but i'm under no illusion that we have a top tier wireless system.

How many in your boarding houses? We are looking at the same possible solution for a sister school. Have you moved away from them or still using them?

Thank you, I'm impressed with the forward thinking.

"Interesting. Ubiquiti being excluded because they don't meet the support level required by the procurement is quite understandable, their business model was never aligned with enterprise/government grade deployments. However requiring >1Gb/s at the wire is a surprise. Once you have a AP under load, do you really get more than 1Gb/s traffic in the air? In all previous iteration of wifi prior to ax, performance collapses after 10-15 devices. n and ac made the huge strides in improving airtime utilization so wifi remained usable at high density for most applications, but raw throughput as measured at the wire would be relatively low compared to the throughput of the AP with only a few devices. Who cares if I get 1 or 2 Gb/s with two macbook pros connected - what matters is how it handles airtime with 30 chromebooks and 30 low-end andriod phones, and a teacher on a 2x2 device streaming Teams. I've not seen any detailed analysis of 802.11ax under load. There was/is lots of analysis around ac. Can ax exceed 1Gb/s with real-world classroom environment loads?" That's an interesting one as well. Do they specify the links from edge to cores? I have a 10GB backbone, but only 2GB (2x1GB) links to the edges. I'm not sure what traffic my clients would be using to justify 2.5GB physical links per AP (and with multiple AP's per edge, that's a potential high bandwidth at the front, with a huge bottleneck at the back).

Thanks MJTayloronline. I see that they are US based, i'm assuming that's never been an issue (timezones etc..?) Cheers B

Thanks round2it, i'll check them out. Does anyone else have any suggestions or recommendations? Cheers and thanks in advance, B

Morning all, We are just finalising our new Ubiquiti install, and our 3rd line support company isn't exactly being the greatest, so i was wondering if there were any other companies out there who could offer the same? My team is fairly hands on, so we are really only looking for that 3rd level support. Can anyone give any recommendations? Cheers & many thanks in advance, B

Sorry to sound confused here, but when did Microsoft double their prices? We only just recently (2 weeks ago) renewed our agreement with them and it was 2k less than last year. If we are going to have to pay double next year, then that's going to be a hard pill to swallow. B

Same as me then when i took over a school with Smoothwall installed. Had a member of my team spending a good day (across the week) on the Smoothwall due to numerous issues. The school didn't even set it up, it was an original install / config carried out by Smoothwall themselves (at least that was what i've been told). Although i always got the impression that their support team was very good. Filtering systems seem to be like marmite, i personally use Lightspeed and am really happy with it (whereas others here will hate it, and conversely i can't stand Smoothwall whereas loads of people here love it). I use Lightspeed, as it's; - Simple to setup and maintain (so simple that our head of e-safety and pastoral care members of staff do the unblocking of websites). - Support is excellent. - It's been rock solid in both schools i've had it installed now (over 4 years). - Reporting features are top notch (and quick to produce the results). - We use the SPAM filter module as well, and it's proved to be very effective (again before we used the Smoothwall for SPAM filtering, and my users have stated they have seen a marked improvement on the reduction of SPAM emails since). The negatives are that it doesn't do anything firewall related, so you need something else to do that for you (we use the Sophos UTM), it doesn't do Layer 7 application filtering (but our Sophos UTM does luckily), it isn't cheap. Also some of the websites it has blocked in the past really shouldn't of been blocked in the first place, but that's easily sorted out. There's plenty of others out there, and i'm sure they all have their success stories. B

What are the type of files you are using? Standard Office files (word, excel etc..) or other formats? B

We've decided to go direct with BT as they also do our internet line. They offer free calls national (fixed and mobile) and international (just fixed, not mobile) and a 4 hour SLA on a fix should a gas / water etc company dig through our cable, they "say" that they guarentee 100% uptime on the SIP offering as well... but that's yet to be seen. Pricing wise it's comparable to our current fixed line offerings and as per their flex internet offering, we can just up the number of channels we need or down the number of channels within a 24 hour turn around, so for example over the summer break we drop the number of channels and then up them again during term time. Works well. B