NTL: Telewest Business
Big Case Studies
West Midlands Emergency Services see net benefits
The West Midlands is home to 5.3 million people and covers cities such as Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton. With such a large population over a wide area, the West Midlands needs a flexible and responsive set of emergency services.
The West Midlands Police – the UK’s second biggest police service – has more than 8,000 front-line officers, and is backed by almost 4,000 support staff and 1,500 special and community support workers. Ensuring high speed communications within the force is critical. Using Evolved Ethernet technology, ntl:Telewest Business was able to put in place an advanced network that reached out to all 120 sites in the region.
West Midlands Fire Service works across seven metropolitan districts and its 2,000 fire-fighters respond to 65,000 incidents in an average year. It has also been taking advantage of next generation networked communications. Eight of the fire services main sites are now connected with ntl:Telewest Business’ Evolved Ethernet system. The authority believes that critical data will now be more easily and quickly accessed in real-time across the network.
The West Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust supports an average of a thousand emergency cases a day, including air ambulance and NHS Direct services, covering some 11 million people. The service selected a fully managed private network from ntl:Telewest Business’ networking arm that, for the first time connects the region’s ambulance stations and district headquarters.
Ian Mason, the Trust’s computer services manager, says, “We have around 35 remote locations and a total of 1,700 staff, so communications technology is vital to the business. The 999 calls we receive, for example, are processed by linking them to a computer-aided dispatch system, which talks to an automotive vehicle location system using GPRS technology. Controllers have a graphical display which they can use to pin-point incidents and the nearest resources for help.”
