Lincolnshire Country Council Wide Area Network

10/06/2009

The Lincolnshire County Council Wide Area Network Replacement Project delivers a unique broadband infrastructure to public sector bodies across the County of Lincolnshire, enabling them to achieve significant operational improvements while enjoying substantial cost savings.

This project also demonstrated how the process of aggregation can deliver tangible advantages in terms of time and value over the alternative strategy of independent procurement.

Lincolnshire County Council and their strategic partner Mouchel (formerly HBS Group Ltd) have worked together with Adit North – the specialist agency established by the DTI to support the Public Sector in ICT and broadband infrastructure procurement – to acquire an infrastructure across Lincolnshire that will meet all of their existing and anticipated operational needs.

The backbone of this infrastructure, which will be supplied by BT utilises advanced Dense Wavelength Multiplexing (DWDM) technology, where data is transported over transparent point-to-point optical fibre links which can be divided to create a series of channels each supporting a different protocol.

Each link has a symmetrical data carrying capacity of 2•5 Gigabytes, which is two and a half times greater than that of the largest current LAN Extension Servers. This network will provide the capacity to achieve the County’s convergence and infrastructure enhancement objectives, while providing the required resilience needed to meet national government targets.

The network will directly connect the major towns and cities of Lincolnshire, with outlying sites being linked to the network via ADSL connections.