West Herts College
EADS was responsible for the design, installation and support of a new multimedia core backbone linking all of the College sites in the Watford and Hemel Hempstead areas. As part of a four-year contract, the solution utilises 100 Mbit/s Ethernet pipes between sites, terminated on fully resilient, hot-swappable Nortel Networks Passport 8600 routing switches at each site.
The solution supported all of the College’s data needs - the intra-site voice traffic was migrated on to the core by provision of PABXs at each site, with the voice call routing optimised to provide least‑cost call routing across all campuses. The Passport 8600 switches provide up to 128 Gbit/s or 96 million packets per second, which is more than sufficient for the planned growth of the system, and will cope easily with the introduction of video conferencing and distance learning as these requirements evolve. The high-speed core will also facilitate links with the College’s educational and industry partners, such as the University of Hertfordshire. A range of ACD solutions were implemented and unified messaging was deployed across the management organisation.