Requirement
Essex County Fire and Rescue Services (ECFRS) required a future-proof broadband network for 58 sites around the County. Their existing WAN topology, a mixture of Metro VPN, Kilostream and DSL supplemented with Wireless, did not offer enough flexibility or a straight-forward upgrade path.
Challenges
The scalable solution had to be rolled out in a relatively short timescale of 6 months, with the site installations to run harmoniously alongside their own internal upgrades and network enhancements. The resulting solution also needed to provide a highly stable platform to support the ECRFS VoIP network. The solution needed to provide fully resilient circuit options to the Central sites to meet the high level of network availability for the ECFRS Mobilisation upgrades and also including a full Disaster Recovery Failover.
Solution
Updata provided a fully managed network with symmetric connectivity of between 4Mb/s and 8Mb/s to 55 remote sites and 100Mb/s to 3 central sites. over the existing backbone network in Essex. The majority of the remote sites were connected via EFM (ethernet in the first mile) to one of the existing 64 access nodes. Those not served by a currently available node, were connected via one of 7 new unbundled exchanges, fibre or wireless circuits. The 3 remote sites were connected via 100Mb/s fibre circuits. Resiliency to the HQ site was achieved via an independently routed 100Mb/s circuit. Further enhancements have also been achieved by the provision of a higher speed internet connection with partial redundancy to the ECFRS new HQ and further resiliency options are underway.