Government

Local Government

WiMax

A simple way to reduce costs and improve performance

• Up to three times the performance of Fibre Circuit

• No Annual Rentals

• Highly Flexible Solution

• Rapid deployment

• Ability to move the system

• Bandwidth scales from 40Mbps - 80Mbps - 150Mbps to 300Mbps

The challenge

Local Government has never been under so much pressure to cut costs as they are at present. At the same time the demand for their services is higher than ever.

While bugets are being cut, the demand for CCTV and data circuits is continually increasing, and the days of being able to simply order more fibre circuits from the authorities sevrice provider is becoming a thing of the past

In our example, the local council IT department had a requirement to improve performance to some of its offices and at the same time to cut costs. The council had 8 sites which were currently connected 100Mbps fibre circuits.

The sites were connected using British Telecomm fibre services which had an annual rental of £38,914 per year; Table 1 below provides a breakdown of the annual rental the council had to pay.

The solution

The council needed to reduce these annual rental costs and agreed to a site survey between the town hall and leisure centre, a distance of some 1.6km to evaluate how effective wireless technology could be. The survey demonstrated a full 300Mbps could be achieved between the sites with 99.999% availability.

The benefits

A 300Mbps wireless link was installed and immediately provided 3 times the performance the BT circuits were providing; on top of that the operating costs were slashed as there is no ongoing rental to pay. Return on investment was in less than 14 months and the council quickly moved on to rolling the wireless out to other sites.

An added bonus is the fact CCTV cameras can be integrated into the network and carried across the wireless links, allowing a single infrastructure to service both the Security manager and the IT manager.

Shortly after the council needed to relocate their staff to a new temporary office and BT's 60 day lead time for fibre meant they would be held up, so they requested we test the site for wireless connectivity and within one week they had a lower cost 100Mbps system in place and staff were able to move into their new office.

Wireless now provides reliability levels as high as fibre, while allowing greater flexibility and tremendous savings in operational costs.

Introductory page

Case Studies overview page

Last updated: September 2010