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Case Study For Cisco ‘Borderless Networks’ Announcement – 17th March 2010

Agile nation pioneers borderless network

Wales, a constituent nation of the United Kingdom with a population of 3m people, is on course to become the first country in the world to achieve the Cisco vision of a completely borderless network embracing all of its public services.

Through its ambitious project entitled Public Sector Broadband Aggregation (PSBA), Wales is using Cisco technology to create a single unified national broadband network that enables public service agencies to collaborate at will.

To date it covers all of Wales’ hospitals, doctors’ surgeries, local government offices, universities and further education colleges.

Already public sector staff at more than 2,000 sites are connected to the network and the figure is expected to rise to 10,000 over the next few years as other services such as schools, police, fire and ambulance are linked in.

Eventually all 350,000 public sector workers in Wales – including several thousand home-based staff – will be able to access the network to aid inter-agency collaboration, reduce cost and increase the efficiency of public services.

The PSBA is being created by Logicalis over a seven-year time span, using Cisco technology to create the necessary connections. This pioneering national information and communications platform enables the delivery of voice, video and data services across a fast, secure and reliable infrastructure.

It is based on a high-capacity optical core network, which was funded by the Welsh Assembly Government and partners in the health, education and local government sectors. It is running at 2.5 Gbps.

The emerging PSBA network was used in 2009 to create a secure system for information sharing between agencies in health and local government in preparation for the expected global swine flu pandemic. The system was created within days at minimal cost whereas previously such a resource would have taken many months to configure and, in the view of the Welsh Assembly Government, may have been prohibitively expensive.

More recently a countryside protection agency within the Welsh public sector has achieved annual savings of £100,000 on secure connections between 14 sites dispersed across remote locations.

Universities in particular are using the borderless network opportunity to increase international collaboration which requires secure high-speed connectivity, and to expand the availability of remote-learning. The system is also supporting the growth of telemedicine across Wales.

In addition Wales sees the growing PSBA network as a catalyst for increased economic activity, encouraging inward investment and indigenous business growth.

In the wake of the recession, which has placed huge pressures on public sector budgets, the borderless network approach has provided Wales with the opportunity to achieve greater efficiencies through collaboration while maintaining the quality and level of service.

>> View the 'Agile nation pioneers borderless network' video on YouTube!