Cove School: “All we wanted was reliable service and support”

Situation

Cove school https://www.coveschool.uk/ is a secondary school in Farnborough maintained by the Hampshire local authority.  They have used Coconnect for 3 years and have recently renewed for another 3. Cove currently operates with a 1Gps connection and Smoothwall filtering, they use Microsoft systems and are running a SIP trunk over the broadband network for telephony.

We spoke with Ian Williams, network manager at the school.

Problem

Cove had used council broadband services for a number of years, but when HSPN2.1 was introduced, they took the option to move away to a specialist school broadband provider, looking for higher bandwidth, better value and more predictable support. Initially moving from county support seemed a risk, but the reality of the change has been very positive for the school. It has also given Cove a head start as Hampshire move away from broadband provision entirely.

Result

The initial install went smoothly and the network performs well. Ian cannot remember any network outages.

Cove was able to move quite seamlessly into remote teaching and learning at the beginning of the pandemic, using Teams and other systems supported with Azure.

The Smoothwall filtering system is performing well, every so often the parameters are adjusted to allow access to specific material that would normally be outside permissions and Ian uses Coconnect support where necessary to help him to make these changes.

Comment

In Ian’s words, “all we want is a reliable service and a support on the end of an email or a phone if there are any issues.  What we wanted is something what was always working and always there and honestly it just works, the teaching staff don’t even notice the broadband system, which is exactly what we want!”

Ian recommends Coconnect on the Hampshire networks managers forum.

Find more of  our customers feedback here, or if you want to know how Coconnect can help you contact us here.