Cambridge police get together on Wan

Cambridgeshire Constabulary is preparing to upgrade its communications network, having signed a £2.6m five-year deal with Arqiva Public Safety.

Arqiva will build a wide area network to connect 19 premises across Cambridgeshire. The managed Wan will combine fibre and microwave technologies and will provide 30 times the capacity and data transmission speeds of the current network.

The new system is expected to increase the core data capacity from 34Mbit/sec to 1Gbit/sec.

Arqiva will extend the existing microwave network, which it has managed since 1998.

The network upgrade follows news in June that Cambridgeshire Constabulary was among four police forces to adopt Novell software to bolster the security of their networks.