Herefordshire County Council aims to be the first local
authority to introduce a county-wide voice over IP
system.
The deployment will boost joined-up working across the county's
public sector organisations and will deliver substantial savings on
networking and telecoms bills, the council said.
The council has signed a deal with Siemens Communications to
update its Lan and Wan infrastructure VoIP to link 2,100 council
officers, all 105 schools in the county and 10 libraries.
The single data and telephony system will replace three
different networks currently used by the council, said
Herefordshire County Council's head of ICT, Julie Holmes.
Siemens will begin laying cables connecting the 200-plus sites
next month and complete the process by April next year.
Every local authority property will get connections with minimum
data speeds of 10Mbytes.
The council predicts large revenue savings as its many end-users
migrate to the new network.
Holmes said she was expecting savings of "multiple millions over
the next three to four years".
Siemens Communications' account manager for government vertical
markets, Hadyn Dunant, said, "Just by introducing a VoIP solution
that embraces those remote locations automatically makes them one
body. It must introduce efficiency savings."
According to Holmes, the network deployment is top IT priority
for 2005. The network improvement follows Herefordshire's
implementation of an SAP Enterprise 4.7 procurement function over
the summer.
The Herefordshire VoIP system will run on Cisco hardware and
Siemens' Hipath DX and Hipath 4000 communications servers.
The service will be monitored from Siemens Communications'
network operations centre, which is based in Wellingborough.
The council's call centre runs on Siemens' Hipath Procenter
system.