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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

We use BT. Not sure (the name escapes me at the moment) what the product is called, but it allows us to drop the bandwidth from 200MB to 50MB (50MB is what we set it to, but it could be as little as 1MB. They do have a restriction of the 4 week change period though) over the Summer break and get the cost savings. It's been 100% reliable and they have given us a 4 hour SLA (fix) no matter how the break occurs. Plus we get the full 200MB as well. Obviously different needs and budget, but i would never be happy having the filtering, VPN and firewall being carried out by a 3rd party. The filtering is for YOUR pupils safety, the VPN is for YOUR staff's secure access and the firewall is to protect YOUR data and systems. A third party (no matter what they say) will never give the same importance and flexibily to these requirements than the in house department. B

Hi, We currently run a Sophos UTM-9 but on it's own hardware (as in it's on the hardware appliance supplied by Sophos). It's been completely stable and a joy to use being completely open. The IPS does hit the CPU, and we have an issue with this at the moment which has been reported to Sophos who confirm it's an issue and are working on a fix. But in terms of stability, reliabilty and so forth i couldn't be more happier with it. B

I agree, but i do have to say if a teacher searches for "jugs" and gets some bad results, then it's not the fault of the ICT systems. The teacher in question should of had their lesson plan in place before hand and carried out the search before going "live". My view is the same as yours, in that ICT look after the systems and are just the actioners of the requests - Myself nor my team have been trained in e-safety, nor are we children safe-guarders either. Our unblock requests from pupils and teachers alike go to both the ICT team and our e-safety officer and head of pastoral care, the ICT team will give guidance on technical reasons on the unblock requests, and the staff can view the websites themselves to determine if the website is ok to be unblocked or not. But it's certainly not my teams role to say yes or no to access to websites which have academic value within lessons. B

If it's just for the Art Staff to use, then why not? There is some questionable material on the site, but again, if it's the staff and it's for academic usage, then i can't see why you would block it. Surely if the request has come to your team and it was questionable, then you would go to your SMT to ask for clarification and their opinion? I don't mean to rude on this, but if there is an academic usage for the unblock, then who are ICT to say yes or no? B

Thanks for the replies, and i apologise for not replying sooner (holiday). I'm still not convinced that the Smoothwall does what it says on the tin. Everyone within the school was frustrated with it - as it was blocking websites which had references to drugs and sex (and these were ordinary sites (news sites for example). It even was stopping myself from reading articles about hacking and security issues. It could of been a setup issue, as it was in place when i arrived - but we had a good relationship with Smoothwall support and after numerous calls nothing really changed. I found the Lightspeed device so simple, that we have handed over the unblocking requests to our pastoral team. As in, they login to the device management console and manually unblock sites requested by the pupils and staff and we (IT) have zero involvement anymore. The reporting features are way ahead of Smoothwalls (and i know i sound like an advertisment of Lightspeed, and i do apologise for that), that it was instrumental in stopping a pupil taking their own life (search query reporting). I read the comment about taking a while to get the Smoothwall setup for use, but i have to compare to the Lightspeed installation, which took just over a day. When we had the Smoothwall, i had one of my team spend a good day per week on it dealing with all the unblock requests etc.. and now we hardly ever login to the filtering device. The Sophos UTM is just fantastic - it really does do exactly what it's supposed to - and again so so easy to use. As said i'm struggling to understand what it does that makes it so favourable here, as in my area we hold monthly ICT forums with a good number of schools within my area and every ICT manager who has one wishes they didn't, but can't move due to budgets etc.. Again and i repeat, i'm not a poster child for Lightspeed, but after reading these forums for a good number of years i'm just shocked at the approval of Smoothwall. B. Quick Edit: @elsiegee40 Our pupils hated it, because it stopped them from researching legal websites when it came to drugs, sex or guns. They simply installed VPN's on their laptops and got around the filtering completely and were able to access any sites they wanted to. They also wanted to use Skype and Facetime (on all of their devices) to talk to family and friends and after numerous calls to Smoothwall we were unable to get a resolution. However our pupils really do hate lightspeed, with many requests coming from the Student council asking for it to be removed.

Firstly - Hello everyone, this is my first post but i've been a regular reader of the forums. I'm posting to ask why there is such a degree of approval regarding Smoothwall? I've just moved into a new school and immediately got shot of the device and replaced it with a SOPHOS UTM for the firewall and Lightspeed for web filtering and email filtering. Our pupils and staff saw the change in the responsiveness of the internet immediately. I simply couldn't stand the reporting features of the Smoothwall - it took ages to produce a report and the reports were so limited compared to the Lightspeed device. I'm not saying that the Smoothwall is a bad solution, but in the 6 months of trying to get my head around it, i just couldn't see anything positive about it. When i arrived we saw that we had a massive VPN problem (near 80% of our pupils were using VPN's to get around the filtering provided by Smoothwall now all gone with SOPHOS and Lightspeed), Skype connectivity was hit and miss (we are a boarding school) and this was noted in the inspection report as well. And Smoothwall support couldn't offer any solutions. As mentioned, i had 6 months with Smoothwall and was expecting good things from it, but in the end i was sorely disappointed. So i ask as an honest question, what does it do which makes it so recommended here at Edugeek? Cheers B