David Willington wrote:
Dear All
I've been asked to look into alternative broadband solutions for a
school.
At the moment they use the LEA's connection and aren't 100% happy.
It's a
new thing for me, but I think a 2Mb dedicated line or 8Mb with a low
contention ratio (5:1 or so) might do the trick. They're asking about a
10Mb dedicated line which I think is probably going to be overkill as
well
as beyond the budget (I've no idea what the budget might be though). The
school's got about 500 machines and run their website and Virtual
Learning
Environment in the school, so the upload speed would need to be
reasonable.
I have heard of schools using (from memory) Easynet or Eclipse
internet. It is worth bearing in mind
that the government push for all schools to be conected to a national
education network is at force here.
Lea/rbc connections altomatically count, but there are only a small no
of suppliers who seem to be able to do
this. Gov. guidelines is a 10Mb symetrical circuit to allow video
conferencing etc. The only thing our RBC connection
gets us is free access to the pathe news archives.
I think quite a lot of schools have a secondry ADSL link as a
backup/to get round filtering problems, a quick linux firewall
and squidguard installation is what I would like in the school I work...
Most problems are down to politics as aposed to technical in this area.
Rob Keeling