Hertfordshire cuts costs and boosts speed with new broadband network

Network specialist Updata will provide Hertfordshire's schools with faster broadband

Hertfordshire County Council has gone live with a new shared broadband infrastructure from network specialist Updata.

The council said the move will cut its network running costs by 12.4 per cent per year compared with the previous solution provided by Virgin Media. The contract is worth £25m over six years.

The infrastructure will connect nearly 600 primary and secondary schools and 260 other sites, including libraries, care homes, day centres and the council offices.

The new solution has also increased bandwidth to schools in the county, with junior schools seeing their bandwidth increased from 2Mbit/s to 8Mbit/s, running on a copper network, and senior schools seeing their network speed increased from 10Mbit/s to 100Mbit/s, running on a fibre network.

Hertfordshire County Council now has a mixed MPLS network with 8Mbit/s copper and 100Mbit/s fibre access services.

Updata is also able to maintain a symmetrical network, delivering matching 8Mbit/s upload and download rates.

Victor Baldorino, director of Updata, said his firm is able to offer better value than most of the big network providers because it has a presence in BT's exchanges.

Thanks to local loop unbundling, it is able to fuse the copper wiring within the exchanges to provide significantly increased bandwidth at a low cost.

Updata's presence in 45 out of a total of 75 exchanges within the county gives its network considerable resilence, according to Baldorino. Other network designs often run through one central point, offering less redundancy.

Hertsfordshire put out a tender in January 2010 and, by August last year, the contract was awarded.

The infrastructure was completed on schedule in June. If Updata had been late completing the project it would have been liable to pay £250k damages.

Separately, the Council paid a £600k 'insurance' cap against excess, unknown build costs. Any excess build costs beyond the £600k were liable for payment by Updata.

The network has been designed to be PSN ready, with other public services, such as the Fire & Rescue Service and Urban Traffic Control, likely to sign up to the network once their contracting cycles are up.

Dave Mansfield, head of technology for Hertfordshire County Council, explained that further network projects will include increasing the core network from 1Gbit/s to 10Gbit/s, then connecting district councils and the NHS trusts.

He said: "Many NHS trusts are currently connected to a country-wide NHS network called N3; however, N3 is a very expensive supplier. It may be that some trusts would benefit financially from getting some of their broadband services through the council."

Another potential move for both Hertsfordshire and Updata is the provision of network services to business parks that suffer from less than adequate broadband access.

Updata has launched a service called Updata Business Broadband, which Mansfield said he is keen to deploy. However, he explains that he has been unable to do this as yet.

"BDUK [the body responsible for distributing state funding for broadband rollout] states that its funding cannot be diverted to the private sector, so we are currently looking at whether there is anything we can do to change this," he said.