For those schools who are on the Rydal broadband service and have been experiencing poor performance recently, we are aware of the following being sent to schools on 13/03. We are sharing it below, in case you have not seen it.
Dear All,
I feel it’s only right for me to email you directly in relation to the broadband services we provide.
I want to assure you that we are fully aware of the ongoing problems and are actively working to resolve them. Despite seeing further issues today, there has been positive news in recent hours which I will share towards the end of the email.
Transparency is crucial to us, so allow me to provide you with some context on the issues we've been facing and our plan to address them.
Rydal Group maintains separate broadband networks, one for our direct business clients and one that serves schools. Recently, we've encountered intermittent issues specifically within the school network, resulting in slow internet speeds for some schools. When building out our network we plan our utilisation on known and typical usage profiles from our existing base. We also ensure a reasonable overhead for peak loads or occasional global increases in demands, such as key software updates etc.
Unfortunately, despite this, it seems a number of schools, particularly within a specific trust, are showing high traffic profiles representing 6 to 7 times a typical school of the same size and bringing the total demand on our schools broadband network beyond what we had allowed overhead for. Despite having planned infrastructure expansion to support future growth, in the lead up to this, unexpected challenges have arisen.
In December, we approved plans to upgrade our school infrastructure starting during the upcoming school Easter holidays. We believed this timing would minimise disruption especially as Smoothwall, your filtering solution and our partner, are implementing their own changes to enhance reporting capabilities scheduled for implementation during this period. Both elements are intended to see minimal and next to no impact on the school – in layman’s terms, it should all be happening in the background without you really noticing.
However, as the demand on our schools network has increased, intermittent issues have started to persist and intensify, we faced a difficult decision: implement the Easter project immediately but potentially impact service long term due to rushed implementation or proceed with our planned upgrade dates in the Easter holidays. After careful consideration, we chose the latter, prioritising a stable, long-term solution while managing the intermittent issues as they arose.
The intermittent issues being seen have been challenging and we expected these to calm sooner than they have.
Our team has been working tirelessly to mitigate these issues, conducting maintenance both during and outside of regular hours. Yesterday, our technical leads made the decision to reroute traffic within our core network, still utilising Smoothwall, to address the intermittent service.
Today's outage, that impacted some but not all schools was a consequence of this rerouting as we encountered unforeseen challenges during the transition. While initial testing showed promise, real-world conditions presented obstacles. Consequently, we reverted to the previous setup to minimise disruption and have since investigated why this failed.
As of now, I am pleased to say we are closer to resolving the issue. Nine schools have now successfully transitioned to the rerouted setup this afternoon without encountering any problems, which we have confirmed with their respective IT teams.
This is indicating that the issues for those impacted this morning were related to a specific configuration that has since been reviewed and amended and is providing a stabilised connection.
We plan to reroute more schools over the coming days and further reduce demand on our schools network which will fully stabilise service.
I want to reassure you that we anticipate these intermittent issues settling down imminently, with the full upgrade scheduled being provided for the upcoming half-term break, this will ensure we have greater network sustainability and never have to revisit this topic again.
Your support during this challenging period is greatly appreciated.
Kind Regards,
Steffan Dancy
Managing Director