Hampshire and Isle of Wight upgrades network infrastructure

£90m contract to "transform public service delivery"

Improved fibre connectivity to boost bandwidth and converge Hampshire public service networks

The Hampshire and Isle of Wight partnership (HIOW) has selected business carrier ntl:Telewest Business to upgrade the county's network infrastructure and put in place a managed solution for monitoring all the services provided.

The £90m contract will allow optical fibre network connections to more than 1,000 sites, including 15 local authorities, fire service, schools, colleges and voluntary organisations. Ntl:Telewest Business will provide dedicated staff and support desk facilities.

The new infrastructure builds on the facilities of the existing Hampshire Public Services Network (HPSN), creating HPSN2. HPSN2 will converge a number of HIOW's wide area networks (WANs), including council corporate WAN, schools’ and fire service’s WAN and Hampshire County Council’s office network – on to a single, high-capacity infrastructure.

Jos Creese, Hampshire County Council's head of IT, said HPSN2 would give a faster, more secure and more cost-effective network.

"Increased bandwidth will improve education, and faster connections to emergency and social services will mean quicker and more effective response times," said Creese.

Each partner organisation will be able to choose the bandwidth and bundle of IT services they need to meet their communication requirements, and all traffic will effectively be separate.

The initial phase of the project will use the Metropolitan Ethernet Virtual Private Network (VPN) to connect the area’s county council, district councils, borough councils, unitary authorities and fire service, and play a central role in the delivery of shared services and flexible working initiatives.

The network will give about 15,000 staff real-time access to back-office applications and allow them to be connected whether working from home, remote office or any authorised location within the network area.

Future phases will beef up education network resources in the county, with staff and students at up to 800 primary and secondary schools able to use HPSN2. The increased bandwidth will support the delivery of video-rich teaching resources, e-learning tools and virtual learning environments.

Primary schools will be connected using 10Mbit/s links, while secondary schools will have 40Mbit/s network links.