Flagship Housing has replaced its ‘point-to-point’ network with an industrial-strength multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) solution from Timico.
Sandra Smith, IT systems development manager, Flagship Housing, said, “We wanted to move away from our existing network solution as the ‘point-to-point’ set up we had in place was delivering much less bandwidth than we needed and it was also very expensive to run.
Flagship, which manages more than 21,000 properties across East Anglia, chose Timico provide it with an MPLS-based network, which involved connecting all of Flagship’s network links to Timico’s network locations throughout the UK, then using their network to link Flagship’s sites together.
Smith added, “We now have a more resilient, flexible and scalable network infrastructure to connect all of our sites. Plus there are huge cost benefits, as each site connects to the closest location that Timico has in that area, which is often much closer than the distance between our offices.”
Following Timico’s installation of the new network, Flagship has quadrupled the bandwidth between many of its sites, while its 41 satellite offices no longer have 512k ADSL connections as they have upgraded to the fastest broadband that the phone lines can support. In one instance, the link between Flagship’s Dereham and Keswick sites as increased from 2Mbps to 1Gbps, a 500-fold increase.
Smith explained, “We now have a 21st-century network-enabled service, with higher bandwidth, fewer points of failure, lower maintenance costs, and the ability to expand the network as needed.
“Expanding our network in the future will be easier as each of our sites now connects into the Timico ‘cloud’. The network is therefore significantly more efficient in terms of how it sends data between offices, as the ‘cloud’ allows each office to connect directly to every other.”
The cost savings resulting from the introduction of Timico’s MPLS technology has also meant that a number of Flagship’s sites now have a backup broadband link to increase the resilience of the network.
