Hever Castle has implemented a converged voice and data network to reduce maintenance costs and open up the possibility of new real-time applications for admissions and retail.

The castle in Kent ties has installed an optical fibre backbone across its 600 acre campus.

Previously the site which includes the castle, gatehouse, gift shops, restaurants and a golf club ran separate voice and data networks which did not extend to all buildings.

BT provided the new infrastructure of structured cabling and optical fibre connections, with Cisco and Nortel equipment.

The existing Nortel telephone system was also upgraded to support IP telephony.

David James, finance director at Hever Castle, says the new infrastructure has cut costs and improved communications across the campus.

‘When we bought the golf course in 2002, we had two systems with no connections. It had its own Lan, email system and servers. Maintenance and hardware costs were duplicated and it made basic tasks even harder, such as the extra time it took sending reports between the two email systems which used different telephone exchanges,’ he said.

New systems include a real-time electronic point of sale system incorporating chip-and-Pin card authorisation and IP telephony.

Previously calls between the golf course and the castle were made over the public telephone network.

‘We see IP telephony as the future. We haven’t had a huge amount of cost savings as yet - around £1000 on calls - but it is stable and the quality is high,’ said James.

‘The network will enable retail to go real-time. We can have different pricing at different times of the day,’ he said.

The admissions system is currently till-based involving manual processing, but James hopes to install intelligent PC-based tills within two years.

By July, clocking in of the 220 staff, currently dealt with by the accounts department, will be facilitated at a departmental level as fibre across the estate permits more time clocks, says James.

‘We have a main single point of administration internally, but now more processes can be dealt with departmentally which will get people more involved in the business,’ he said.