Schools connect to our network using edge site equipment located in each school. The network itself is a Wide Area Network, or WAN, covering the Sandwell area, with a small number of connections outside of the borough.

Each school connects directly to the nearest "node" on the network backbone. Connections are at 10Mbit/s for most schools, with a few connecting over DSL and a small number of High Schools connected at 100Mbit/s.

You can monitor your school's use of the bandwidth here.

Some of the High Schools act as sub-concentrators, bringing together the connections of several local primary schools.

The core backbone operates at 1Gbit/s, as does the data centre, which is located at Oldbury Council House. This is where the external firewalls, the proxy caches, AV filters, web and DNS servers are located.

Connection to the Internet is via the Oldbury data centre and uses a 1Gbit/s link via JaNET

Click here for details of SLAs and call handling procedures