North Staffordshire Trust aims to save £100k a year with community network

North Staffordshire NHS Trust has selected Updata Infrastructure to build and manage a new region-wide community of interest network (Coin) that should save it about £100,000 a year in costs.

The Coin will initially connect 112 NHS sites, including hospitals, primary-care centres, dentist surgeries, health centres and child health clinics. The contract will last for three years.

It will link 4,300 PCs, 3,000 phones, 7,000 users and provide access to email, file storage, IP telephony and unified communications.

"Our new Coin will provide a range of networking technologies that were simply not available under our previous contract," said Richard McCue, core technologies manager, North Staffordshire Combined Healthcare NHS Trust.

The network will use 2Mbit/s and 10Mbit/s Ethernet in the first mile (EFM), ADSL and fibre, where new sites can be provisioned in 10 days, down from 90 days previously.

"Making greater use of EFM enables us to reduce networking costs annually, provision new sites significantly more quickly and, if an EFM service fails, we will have network degradation, but it will not fail completely," said McCue.

"We can also scale up or scale down this type of service to match site usage much more easily than is possible with standard fibre."

McCue has indicated that after the initial 112 sites are connected, an additional five or six will be included.

"Plus, as an IT team, the Coin allows us to remotely deploy operating systems and software patches from our central site; negating the need to visit local sites and ultimately providing a far superior level of support," he added.

The high-speed core network will be managed by Updata, but infrastructure within end sites is controlled and managed by North Staffordshire's IT support team.

North Staffordshire would not reveal the value of the contract, but said it was paying an installation plus rental fee in the first year, and for the following two years would just pay the rental fee.