School ICT News Bulletin No. 218 - 27/03/2013

Published by ICT Shared Services

Broadband Service

Over the last week a number of schools have reported slow broadband performance. As a result of continuing investigations by BT and Cisco it has been found that there is exceptionally high CPU utilisation on the Norfolk Broadband firewalls. This appears to be caused by a large number of small data packages regularly hitting the firewall. BT and CISCO implemented some changes on Monday night to the firewalls which has seen a considerable decrease in the firewall utilisation and schools we have spoken to have confirmed an improvement in performance. BT and Cisco are now looking at further changes which they expect to improve the service.

This is being treated as a high priority and we continue to work with BT and a number of identified schools to resolve this urgently. Regular technical updates on our investigations are being posted directly to Network Managers via the Google Group.

Author: Lynn Parvin

Smoothwall rollout

As a result of a problem with the broadband performance we have postponed the Smoothwall rollout to most schools in order to minimise any changes to the network.

We will re-commence the Smoothwall rollout as soon as the Broadband service is stable. We will advise the revised timetable, as soon as possible.

Author: Lynn Parvin

Broadband Contract

The current Broadband contract with BT terminates in March 2014. We are currently considering the options which are to extend for a further 2 years or go to the market.

Either way we expect to

• Double the size of the internet pipe – currently 1GB.
• Provide schools with the maximum capacity of their link
• Ensure we exploit Better Broadband for Norfolk across the county

We will update you as the project progresses.

Author: Lynn Parvin