Nottinghamshire County Council has chosen MLL Telecom as the sole supplier for a regional framework for the provision of wide area network (WAN) services.
In a deal worth £2.7 million it has made the first call-off on the contract for the upgrade of its own WAN, which includes a pilot of a software defined WAN (SD-WAN).
MLL said the framework, which is set to be available to public sector bodies for four years, could have an overall value of up to £250 million.
The SD-WAN pilot is due to take place this summer and will run across a number of council sites to assess the technology’s performance against a traditional WAN, with the aim of meeting the council’s latency requirement of less than 20 milliseconds.
MLL will work on the project it strategic partner SSE Enterprise Telecoms, which is in the process of extending the reach of its nationwide network and will provide support in the unbundling of several BT exchanges. This should enable access to ethernet services of up to 10Gbps on 100Gbps backhaul.
PSN and HCSN connections
The full network upgrade, which is scheduled for completion by the end of the year, will include connections to the Public Services Network and the Health and Social Care Network, with the option to additional services such as SIP (session initiation protocol) trunks and voice over IP telephony.
It will be made available to more than 200 sites around the county, including those of healthcare partners and arm’s length organisations.
Nigel Stevenson, service director finance, infrastructure and improvement at Nottinghamshire County Council, said: “Access to reliable and resilient connectivity is of vital importance to Nottinghamshire’s public sector organisations. Technology plays an important role in improving operational efficiencies, but only if we have the right underlying connectivity to support it.
“We chose MLL Telecom based on its clear capability to improve network connectivity in the area and meet our latency requirement while delivering an SD-WAN trial that we are keen to explore.”
Gail Harvey, business development director, public sector at MLL, said: “The new network will be key to futureproofing the council’s connectivity and will be able to support more, varied services.”
Image from GOV.UK, Open Government Licence v3.0
