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Power behind the frontline
Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service deployed a 21st century network from Easynet just over a year ago. Dawn Davison-Read speaks to Alan Newcombe, information systems officer at the brigade to identify how this next generation network is helping improve the efficiency of the service, and about the additional enhancements following the completion of the upgrade at the end of August 2007...
The Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service attend some 12,000 incidents every year ranging from road and rail accidents to fuel and chemical spills, aviation and waterway incidents, collapsed buildings and of course, fires. Covering an area that includes one of Europe’s busiest motoroways, the brigade needs to ensure that its non-emergency (yet still critical) communications which link each of its 20 fire stations and headquarters are both resilient and efficient.
The brigade required a fully managed network that would increase bandwidth and reliability as well as offering voice over IP (VoIP). Following a standard tender procedure, the contract was awarded to Easynet, due it is ability to provide a wholly owned network based on fast, flexible, modern multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) technology and also for its ability to work closely with the brigade.
The fact that Easynet had pioneered Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) was another factor in its success. explained Alan Newcombe, information systems officer at the Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service, "The other providers couldn't give us a full service because part of their network would always be owned by BT. But now Easynet has its own equipment in exchanges it has full control over both bandwidth and price and that makes it much easier for us to increase our bandwidth cost-effectively."
More speed, more services
Easynet has dramatically increased the Service's bandwidth for the same cost as its previous solution and plans to increase it further, taking advantage of Easynet's new EtherStream product. Newcombe added, "The Easynet network is very flexible - we can increase our bandwidth at any time without having to pay for a new line to be laid."
Easynet can prioritise the Service's data so that voice and video can take advantage of even higher bandwidth while everyday data such as email is held back. "Having voice over IP is a great step forward for us," said Newcombe. "It means we can have twenty phones for the same price as one and integrate voicemail into email and provide unified messaging." Continuing he said, “We are also able to provide video conference facilities as well, which enables both daily tasks as well as in major incident scenarios to be handled remotely, equating to efficiency drivers.”
Newcombe also explained that the brigade is now able to update appliance MDTs via the network. “Because the updates can be achieved differentially and are much faster than with previous technologies utilised in the past station computers and appliance MDts can all be updated far more frequently. “For instance it used to take us up to three days to update all of our stations’ operational intelligence systems, with this new network we can now achieve this within 1.5 hours - a huge time saving, essentially meaning more updates can be achieved and the data is more reliable.”
Since the recent upgrade, the brigade now has even more bandwidth available, which means that its’ ‘hot streets’ campaign using GIS mapping to identify trends can now be tied in with community safety projects. “The solution is enabling us to continually evolve applications and our officers are able to use even more sophisticated tools to provide them with even more reliable and up-to-date intelligence to help us become even more efficient.”
This NGN is also enabling Berkshire to deploy a wireless network, providing a further benefit of the MPLS network, and with the low latency back ups are enabled of remote data more effectively too.
Newcombe also explained that by taking advantage of broadband and maximising the data the brigade can share information far more easily than previously. “We have seven local authorities that we are currently working with, and through our 21st century network we can share VPN connections with them all of the protocols and security agreements are in place to enable us to become far more integrated with other agencies. Concluding Newcombe stated, “The biggest impact we have noticed is the ability to work more effectively both internally and with partner agencies, it isn’t one person or agency controlling or paying for the network which ultimately results in us being able to better serve the public.”
