Norfolk County Council and its partners have chosen MLL Telecom to provide their connections to the Health and Social Care Network (HSCN).
Under a five-year deal the managed network services provider will supply the council and its partners among hospital trusts and clinical commissioning groups with individual ethernet connections.
It is part of the effort to migrate all the relevant services from the existing NHS N3 broadband network to the HSCN by the end of April next year.
The council has been the first organisation to sigh the contract with others expected to follow soon.
It will involve connecting approximately 170 sites over an MPLS core network, which MLL said will provide them with additional bandwidth at lower cost. It cited the prospect of James Paget, Norfolk & Norwich University and Queen Elizabeth Hospitals receiving primary and secondary 1GBps connections, and said each partner will be able to overlay additional services such as video conferencing and VoIP.
The company will assume responsibility for reporting on and managing the capacity of the network end-to-end.
Improvements expected
Geoff Connell, Norfolk’s chief information officer, said: “Norfolk County Council will achieve a considerable improvement to performance and resilience through the introduction of the new MLL HSCN service, while at the same time making significant cost savings.”
He added: “The network is the plumbing for all-important future healthcare services for our local residents, and we look forward to using this connection in the future to enable the best possible patient care.”
Image by Graham Hardy / Norfolk County Hall, Martineau Lane, through Wikimedia
