SchoolFibre_Paul

Have Virgin given any indication when they are looking to roll out FTTC? It sounds like a Leased Line (sometimes referred to as FTTP) may be best in this instance. A Leased Line which is a dedicated fibre connection may be more expensive but will be a much more reliable solution (typically with a 99.99% uptime). In the event of downtime, the best industry-leading resolution time is currently a 30minute response and a 4 hour fix. How much would 4G cost? Depending on the cost of this, it may be worth looking at a leased line. With the leased line you could look to share it out between neighbours and segregate the bandwidth (i.e. 4 residents, each get a fully synchronous 25Mbps connection, pay 1/4 of the line each). This tends to be a popular choice when people are unable to get FTTC in the area. Is your dad's business a limited company? I know some organisations who provide leased lines will only deal with limited companies as the cost can be significant (depending on supplier, the existing infrastructure etc). If you need any further help, feel free to drop me a message.

Why is the school objecting so much to this? Office 365 is free for education use. I know of a lot of schools (mostly secondary however) who have official email accounts for pupils, staff and governors. I do think there is an issue with Data Protection here, if not, it's a very grey area to be in it. I personally think Ofsted would have a field day with this should it come to their attention during a visit. This is since the school doesn't have control of the data and it cannot be monitored. Both of which can lead to a whole host of issues. Let's say a teacher and pupil have been messaging inappropriately, it cannot be monitored easily. But if it is all kept "in-house" it could easily be reviewed. In addition to this, you have the issue with spam emails (you would have to implement individual rules on each account to block a domain etc).

More RAM is always good from a future proofing perspective. You never know what else it may come in handy for in the future with technology always changing. I do agree with Supawat1 though, you need to ensure that other areas such as the storage will not act as a bottleneck.

Majority of schools up here in the Newcastle area are closed today. So I'm spending the day working from home!