Alternatives to OneOffice

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Lias

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#181275 8-Oct-2015 19:11

I'm mildly curious, what if any realistic alternatives are currently available in NZ to One Office.

Without going into too much detail, my employer has a fairly large One Office WAN (hundreds of sites). They pay absolutely stupid money for these connections, most of which are pathetically slow (512k, 1mb, 2mb etc). I realise these are business grade connections, with SLA's etc, but the amount they cost is just insane.

Surely there must be something better?

Is it too much to want an Island wide WAN with excellent 24/7 support, decent speeds (even if it was the above type crappy CIR's with burst to line speed), and actually not cost a house a month?

I did find this thread but it's pretty out of date and doesn't really have much info.. http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=86&topicid=101763

Disclaimer: This should be in no way considered anything other than me being curious, or in any way formally associated with my employer.

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PeterReader

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#1402616 8-Oct-2015 19:11

Hello... Our robot found some keywords in your post, so here is an automated reply with some important things to note regarding broadband speeds.

If you are posting regarding DSL speeds please check that

- you have reset your modem and router

- your PC (or other PCs in your LAN) is not downloading large files when you are testing

- you are not being throttled by your ISP due to going over the monthly cap

- your tests are always done on an ethernet connection to the router - do not use wireless for testing

- you read this topic and follow the instructions there.

Make sure you provide information for other users to help you. If you have not already done it, please EDIT your post and add this now:

- Your ISP and plan

- Type of connection (ADSL, ADSL2, VDSL)

- Your modem DSL stats (do not worry about posting Speedtest, we need sync rate, attenuation and noise margin)

- Your general location (or street)

- If you are rural or urban

- If you know your connection is to an exchange, cabinet or conklin

- If your connection is to a ULL or wholesale service

- If you have done an isolation test as per the link above

Most of the problems with speed are likely to be related to internal wiring issues. Read this discussion to find out more about this. Your ISP is not intentionally slowing you down today (unless you are on a managed plan). Also if this is the school holidays it's likely you will notice slower than usual speed due to more users online.

A master splitter is required for VDSL2 and in most cases will improve speeds on DSL connections. Regular disconnections can be a monitored alarm or a set top box trying to connect. If there's an alarm connected to your line even if you don't have an alarm contract it may still try to connect so it's worth checking.

I recommend you read these two blog posts:

- Is your premises phone wiring impacting your broadband performance? (very technical)

- Are you receiving a substandard ULL ADSL2+ connection from your ISP?

I am the Geekzone Robot and I am here to help. I am from the Internet. I do not interact. Do not expect other replies from me.

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pdath

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#1402633 8-Oct-2015 19:20

One Office is a very old product. The current Spark product is called GWS. If you change over you should get a lot more bandwidth for less money.

Vodafone have the existing TelstraClear offering, which was called PIP.

Many ISPs also offer managed WAN services.

And then you have VPN offerings, using technology like Cisco's iWAN technology which gives you something that looks exactly like a WAN but uses ordinary internet tails. UFB is a great pairing for this techbnology.

Try my latest project, a Cisco type 5 enable secret password cracker written in javascript!

lxsw20

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#1402649 8-Oct-2015 19:44

There are other options, when our One Office contract has ended in the past the boss has gone out and got other quotes, which Spark Digital will then usually match or beat or thrown in some other sweeter. It would be a massive task to change WAN provider for that amount of sites, so I doubt it's just an issue of cost in your case.

The connections you speak of that are 2Mbit or less are One Office Lite and are probably SHDSL so 2Mbit is as fast as they get.

michaelmurfy

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#1402685 8-Oct-2015 20:36

We've got a solution from Snap which is far cheaper however with our satellite office being on UFB there isn't really a SLA.

Our office - 20/20 Fibre connection via Citylink - costs approx. $400 per month IIRC.
Satellite office - 100/50 UFB connection, managed router, $200/mo.

Snap managed the connection between the two with a Juniper SRX router. Internet traffic is separated off whilst LAN traffic goes straight to our office.

Without paying stupid money (if you don't really care about SLA's) I would suggest looking into the Meraki range of products. You can get a Z1 Teleworker for $400, preconfigure and send it out (with a Draytek modem if required) and change from HSNS or ask Spark about their SecureME product and creating a solution based around that, they'll provide a VPN endpoint at your office and SecureME 6500-M routers for your remote offices (depending on how big they are).

Without going into too much detail Lotto NZ recently converted from OneOffice to SecureME and they've got thousands of sites across NZ.

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andgor

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#1409287 19-Oct-2015 15:08

At work our voice, (main) Internet and WAN are provided by Vocus, was FX. We currently have 3 sites on the managed WAN. Head office (Kaiapoi) is on FX/Vocus fibre, main Auckland site is on Chorus fibre and a small temporary site in Auckland is on Chorus copper (VDSL). We have 200Mb/s between the Kaiapoi and main Auckland site, the other site is just whatever the VDSL gets (seems to be about 30/10). Generally we've found them pretty good to deal with. If you ever have to ring "faults" they answer straight away and you get somebody that can remote into routers etc (we've been dealing with them when changing circuits). Though if you have 100s of One Office sites you probably have this sort of Spark access as well. They are rather agnostic as to what they use to get from your site to their POPs, local fibre, UFB, Chorus fibre/copper, radio etc.

http://www.vocus.co.nz/product/ip-wan