Internet Access and Filtering

Internet Access and Filtering

During the late 2000s Coventry City Council invested heavily in the digital infrastructure of the city. This included the installation of a full fibre optic network connecting Schools, Libraries, Social Care buildings and other Council buildings into the Coventry Metropolitan Area Network. This network now forms part of the City Fibre network in the city.

As an Internet Service Provider, ICT & Digital provide high speed and reliable internet access to all connected sites across the city.  We do this by maintaining a contract with JaNet to provide internet access and further access to other services. JaNet is a high-speed network for education and research and serves around 18 million users and is the busiest National Research and Education in Europe. You can find out more about JaNet here (https://www.jisc.ac.uk/janet)

Our ISP Service provides more than just Internet Access. Other benefits include:

• Access services provided directly by Coventry City Council making centralised services more reliable.
• Joined networks between different sites are possible as customers are connected to the same network.
• We hold our own IP address space with RIPE rather than obtaining this through JaNET, this means that changes to your public IP addresses are rare.

In addition, we also provide the service with or without Internet filtering, allowing you to be covered by our protections or to supply your own.

Service Description

Fibre Optic Connection

• Maximum 1Gbit Connection to the Coventry MAN (Metropolitan Area Network)
• Maintenance of the fibre connection to the schools including the council managed firewall edge devices.

Internet Service

• Connection to the public internet
• Connection to the Janet academic network (Coventry holds 2x10Gbit diverse circuits – these are shared across Coventry users)

Internet Filtering

• Smoothwall filtering contract for the support of the central clusters of web filtering appliances.
• ICT Support for the web filtering profiles maintained on these central appliances.
• Schools must keep ICT & Digital informed of changes to staff who can approve or request filtering changes.

Public IP Addressing

We can provide public IP address space. Coventry City Council holds it’s own block of IP addresses, which are assigned directly to Coventry City Council, rather than any Internet Service Provider we may use. This means that if we choose to move internet service providers in the future you won’t have to change IP addresses.

Monitoring

• Network performance and alerts using Orion Solarwinds
• Copyright violations and malware notifications – where detected.

Disaster Recovery

We know how important your Internet connection is, and that’s why we have provision in place should you experience a loss of service.

In the event of a complete loss of service where the fibre cable supplying internet access to your site has been damaged by a third party ICT & Digital will supply (at no cost to you) a backup unfiltered internet connection via a 4G mobile router to supply a temporary internet connection to up to a limited number of devices for the duration of the outage.