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Re: [LUG] Primary School BB costs

 

On Mon, 18 Jan 2010, Grant Sewell wrote:

On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:52:24 +0000 (GMT)
Gordon Henderson wrote:

On Mon, 18 Jan 2010, tom wrote:

> My girls primary school (150 headcount) appears to be going to pay
> £25000 for BB over the next couple of years!!
> I haven't approached the head for exact figures  but this sounds
> horrendous. Any comments - I've obviously done the really expletive
> on pretty comprehensively myself.

That'll be the SW Grid For Learning then... A govt. quango outsourced
to ... er, I think.. RM? who just hand the cash over to BT ...

They privide a heavilly filtered feed, often via leased lines - last
time I looked, it was 2Mb (each way) to a primary schools and 8Mb to
secondary, but I suspect they've raised the speeds since then. (I'd
like to at least hope they have, anyway). It's all part of a big
private network managed by BT (or was). The expensive part is the
"last mile" to the school, especially if it's using traditional
leased line technology (be that copper or fibre) and the cisco
routers, etc.

Looking at ADSL - you might look at a good business package - or two.
One for the admin side of things and a totally separate one for the
teaching side. If theycan get 8Mb, then a good business quality
service would probably be OK - at £30 a month depending on data
usage. I can't see that a primary school gets up to much, but I'm a
bit out of touch these days (and the only one I have anything like
hands-on experience with is the local Steiner school and they may not
be representative of a mainstream primary school)

However it's probably the filtering that they sell it on - keeps the kiddies squeaky clean and all that.

I understand that it can be time consuming finding websites and adding
them to a filter list that Schools can use, but surely there's another
way?  Is there not a way for Squid to subscribe to an externally
available filter list?  Maybe a centrally available list that Schools
can subscribe, contribute to and locally override if necessary/desired?

Why don't the teachers educate them into knowing what's right and what's not, and supervise them?

Gordon
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