Many of our local government customers would like a more ‘joined-up’ strategy in place to deliver council-wide wireless access.

One of qolcom’s council customers had an initial requirement for Wi-Fi access in specific areas such as the council meeting and members suite at council HQ. Based on the success of these further installations took place in other council buildings including local libraries.

A bonus of this Wi-Fi solution was to allow use of the ‘People’s Network’ across other council sites with little or no additional infrastructure. In some instances the Peoples Network can be broadcast from other council sites as well as advertising the libraries service electronically in more locations. This brings value to the service by opening access as well as directly supporting the agenda for social inclusion.

One of our customers included the library service as part of a council wide roaming platform that served interested parties such as:

• Staff
• Contractors
• Students
• Library visitors
• Councillors
• Public
• Tourists

Most councils have large wide area networks linking all of their core sites and the aim is to leverage this by allowing secure conditional access by all of these groups of users from many or all sites as appropriate.

By taking this approach the investment in Wi-Fi at each site can be rolled up into a real ROI across the entire council. Management of the Wi-Fi system allows centralised support and monitoring functions so that council IT staff are able to enhance their service offer without impacting IT workloads.

Environmental Benefits of Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi represents a solid environmental benefit for the provision of IT. It saves extensive engineering, all of which requires resources which represent recycling challenges.

A single Wi-Fi access point can provide up to 30 people with voice and data services across several rooms utilising a single UTP cable run and a maximum of 15 watts of power for normal hours of operation.

In contrast to traditional IP services provisioning, if voice and data are migrated to Wi-Fi connections (softphones and Wi-Fi based VoIP handsets) qolcom’s experience show that Wi-Fi removes the requirement for all of the following:

• 30 staff would require a UTP cable for voice and a UTP cable for data and allowing an average of 60m per cable run, equates to 3,600m of cable.
• In many instances it is usually seen as best practice to over-provision UTP cabling to allow “flexibility of equipment location”. Wi-Fi inherently provides this flexibility by its very nature without the need to over provision.
• The 30 UTP data outlets and 30 UTP voice outlets would also require active telephony and LAN switch electronics which consumes power, usually 200 watts per switch device. Therefore 2 switches would utilise in the region of 400 watts compared to only 15 watts of consumed power for an access point.
• Patch cables and other leads are sometimes damaged and would require replacement. Very often these items are not re-cycled.

Wi-Fi has the ability to provide controlled guest and public access without compromising the integrity of the Council’s network, so removing the requirement to provide an additional overlay of cabling, patching and electronics.

Where Wi-Fi is implemented to provide multi-site roaming, a significant increase in staff productivity can be achieved. As a result, the reduction in travel associated with not having to return to the office to obtain access to secure network services, provides additional cost benefits.

The opportunity to log in at the nearest council WAN connected location, using any one of a number of wireless profiles, enables all field based council staff the opportunity to gain full performance access, reduce travel time, increase productivity and maximise efficiency. The savings in fuel, congestion and other associated travel costs may be considerable.

Contact us to find out more.