MLL Telecom has extended its 16-year supplier partnership with Fife Council by renewing the contract by a further three and a half years.
The new deal is worth £7.2 million for the company.
Fife Council employs around 18,000 employees, who provide 900 different services to more than 365,000 people. The services Fife Council provides range from education, social work, housing and community services to transportation.
As part of the new contract, MLL will continue to evolve and enhance Fife Council’s core MPLS network which connects 485 sites including 150 schools. An immediate focus is the provision of a secure and resilient cloud-based connectivity service to support the Council’s Transforming Learning initiative, which involves the roll out of around 36,000 iPad computers to schools from now through March 2026.
The iPads and school infrastructure represent a £50million commitment over the next 10 years from Fife Council's capital and revenue budgets. The digital learning and inclusion initiative will ensure all primary and high school students from P6 through to S7 receive an iPad which can be used in school as well as remotely.
Additionally, MLL will continue to cost-effectively upgrade Fife Council’s MPLS network with the implementation of fibre connections to streamline and improve its performance in areas such as health and social care and housing which will enable adoption of new and innovative technologies such as IoT. Where possible, Fife will use the grants and funding for fibre connectivity available from Gigabit Scotland and the UK Government.
Andrew Milne, infrastructure manager, Fife Council, said, “Over the years MLL has reliably provided network services to transition and transform our wide area network and we are confident they will continue to support its evolution and enable the services we wish to deliver in the future. Our Transforming Learning programme is a good example of our commitment to leveraging the network for delivering social value, ensuring school students from all backgrounds have access to secure digital devices when studying at school or at home.”
Kirste Johnston, MLL’s strategic client director for Scotland & Northern England, said, “We are proud to be continuing our long relationship with Fife Council and to be playing an important role in evolving the network to support digital learning and teaching in schools as well as future initiatives.”
Fife Council’s WAN service is fully supported by MLL’s centralised network operations centre based in Marlow, Buckinghamshire and regional team in Scotland, including client management, technical consultancy, project management, service management and local field engineers.