“We have a head-office in London and a warehouse and resource centre in Northampton as well as staff based at over two hundred other locations across the UK including NHS premises, regional offices, small satellite offices and homeworkers. Therefore, the ability to run video conferencing is key to this upgrade, as it will give us significant savings through a reduction in ongoing travel costs and other associated costs such as accommodation and out of pocket expenses,” says Paul Hughes, Head of Information Technology at The Stoke Association.
“We needed a network that could deliver applications such as video conferencing to a high quality, in a timely fashion and also be future proofed. As our old network service provider didn’t have the class of service (CoS) or quality of service (QoS) we turned to Timico who really know their stuff and engendered confidence right from the start. Their project management has been smooth, like a turnkey solution and they even manage BT for us, a black art in itself! We are also considering using Timico’s VoIP for Business and fully managed Homeworker Services at an appropriate time in the future,” continues Paul Hughes.
The Timico installation at The Stroke Association will be completed over a number of phases. Phase 1, now complete, involved taking over the management of the charity’s data network. The network topology is now a hybrid ADSL/MPLS, which enables the existing ADSL tails to be upgraded to ADSL Max Plus and allows the association to start exploiting the new MPLS connections which will be running video conferencing.
“Timico has provided us with a first class PWAN and we are also benefiting from an enhanced Disaster/Recovery solution. The extra bandwidth and co-location between our Northampton resource centre and London head-office means that if a fire, flood or burglary occurs at either site, all data is secure as there are off-site copies in both locations. Everything in Phase 1 has gone smoothly. The day we were switched on I warned everyone to expect the network to be down for the whole day, whilst each ADSL tail was migrated but everything went live perfectly and we only had two and a half hours downtime! We have seen an immediate twelve-fold increase in bandwidth capacity on the ADSL circuits that have been upgraded and I am already getting good feedback from users.
“Timico has worked hard to make our bills the way we want them using all our internal billing codes and, best of all, I calculate that we are saving around 20% in costs,” concludes Paul Hughes.
Chris Tombs, Chief Executive of Timico Group, comments: “Timico’s business strength IP solutions are ideal for companies for whom a reliable, robust and flexible IP service is essential for running their business critical applications and services. Businesses are more reliant than ever before on their office and data centre network links and need cost effective solutions to connect their growing number of homeworkers. To achieve this, they need a service-oriented partner who can provide secure and reliable IP connectivity today and into the future, and that’s Timico.”
Chris is confident about Timico’s capability on every level and adds: “By understanding the changing needs of IT departments and budgets in the current market conditions, Timico is perfectly positioned to ensure that customers benefit from the right solution that not only fits today’s budget, but will cope with tomorrow’s technical requirements. The underlying infrastructure, the in-house technical expertise and the strong partnerships that Timico has, position us perfectly to rival the bigger network providers who are often less flexible in their approach and unable to deliver personal service.”