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Migration of Hampshire County Council’s Internet Service Provider (ISP)

As part of the introduction of HPSN2, Hampshire County Council is switching Internet Service Provider (ISP).

From 16 July 2011, the service will be delivered by Virgin Media Business. People viewing a Hampshire County Council website will be accessing pages via the Virgin Media Business network. The switchover will improve the web caching system, and deliver the new Flexible Web Filtering service.

Schools need to be aware of the potential for disruption on the switchover day (Saturday 16 July): many services will not be available, and all websites hosted by Hampshire County Council will be affected (this may include your school's own website).

Why are we doing this?

There are several reasons for the change:

  • The new internet feed is part of the HPSN2 framework and helps us deliver best value from our contract with Virgin Media Business
  • The new connection delivers over double the bandwidth of our current internet feed. Depending on the website you are visiting, this could mean a faster service
  • The new connection will be more resilient, delivering a higher quality service and fewer interruptions because there will be no single point of failure on our internet connection
  • Schools will be able to directly own their allocated web site (IP) addresses (like a postal address for each site), giving more control over them in the long term.

What does the change mean?

Hampshire IT must change the routing to all IP addresses for all of our hosted websites and web services. As part of this process, these changes need to be shared with other ISPs so they can update their directories with the new IP addresses. While these changes will be broadcast very quickly, we depend on each public ISP to do its own updates. This means that while this is happening, there will be short periods of time when sites will be unavailable.

Please note that

  • the switchover does not involve any change to web addresses themselves; for example, www.hants.gov.uk will still be www.hants.gov.uk
  • we are not taking down any of our hosted websites; we are merely changing the route through which external visitors see our hosted websites
  • the outage will only affect external internet users; if you physically located in a school at the time, you will still be able to access the internet.

Which sites and services will be affected?

All hosted websites and web services will be affected. The switchover will affect all services using Hampshire County Council’s internet connection:

  • Hantsweb
  • The HantsFire website
  • Test Valley Borough Council’s website
  • All schools’ websites hosted by Hampshire County Council
  • The sites Hampshire County Council hosts for various organisations.

In addition, it affects all services that use the Hampshire County Council internet feed:

  • Hantsnet Passport
  • Hampshire County Council Outlook Web Access
  • OWL.

How long will sites and services be unavailable?

We expect most sites to experience a period of one hour downtime, but there is a possibility that this could be up to 12 hours and in a small minority of cases, 24 to 72 hours. This is a worst case scenario. As the change relies on external parties, we cannot guarantee times, but most of the big UK ISPs have a quick turnaround time to do such updates.

When is this happening?

The work will take place on the evening of Saturday 16 July 2011, between 6pm and 10pm.

What will people see when the change is happening?

During the period of unavailability people trying to access sites should see a standard ‘service is unavailable’ message which advises them to try again later. This will not be in a Hampshire County Council style or formatting.

If we host your website, please be reassured that this does not mean there is a problem with your site, just a temporary inability to connect to it.

Do schools need to do anything?

DNS records

If Hampshire IT hosts your website but you have the Domain Name Service (DNS) record hosted by a third party, such as 123reg, you will need to update their records accordingly to maintain service. Unfortunately we do not have a record of the specific sites this will affect, so if you are unsure please contact the IT Help Desk.

Please note: if you do use an external DNS provider and the website is hosted by Hampshire IT, your website will not be available until you have updated the DNS details. Of course, if a third party hosts your DNS record and your website then there is no action required.

Websites that recognise you by your IP address

It's possible that your school uses websites which recognise you by your IP address. This could include sites to which you subscribe, e-learning sites, curriculum resource providers, and so on.

After the switchover, such sites may not recognise you and will restrict access. If you can't resolve the problem easily with the site provider, please contact the IT Help Desk and we will help.