John Kelly explains how Rapier Systems helped; “We needed more capacity between our Ashington and Bedlington offices. Leasing another line from BT was expensive and tied us into on-going rental costs. Rapier’s wireless network solution gave us all the increased capacity we needed. Their one off cap’ ex charge was cheaper and made budgeting easier, with no on-going rental charges to worry about. They had the radio-wave network up and running within a week! No inconvenience, no fuss. The payback time was less than 12 months and our backups were completed in hours rather than days.”

Additional Request.
The Council then asked Rapier to add a third site, Stakeford, to the network. Rapier's expertise in both data and voice wireless technology helped the council to use their network for both telephone calls and data transfer. They droped their BT lines used at Stakeford, dramatically increased the number of voice circuits between the sites and enjoyed free inter-site phone calls!

Connecting three sites also made the network more robust. If the link from Ashington to Bedlington went down for scheduled maintenance, the network would reroute all voice and data communications via the third site in the triangle.

Scaleable, reliable.
Wansbeck District Council, Blythe District Council and Northumbria County Council then got together and asked Rapier to expand their network. They wanted a complete inter-governmental communication network which stretched across all the major towns in South East Northumberland. The network needed to be scaleable and have the capacity to deal with IT & software developments.

The challenges?
• Demand for resilience throughout the network with no single point of failure,
• Rerouting to be available at all major sites,
• A call-out response time of no more than 2 hours.

Rapier went a stage further. We extended the network across 12 sites and, 2 years on, there has still been zero down time at any of them.

100% secure for high-value CCTV.
All the local authorities in South East Northumberland are now using Rapier Systems’ wireless network to send data and make calls across the county. So it made sense to ask Rapier with transmitting CCTV images too,

“It proved expensive to rent a BT line to transmit images from security cameras back to our central monitoring office. Rapier Systems were able to use our existing CCTV equipment, digitise the images and send them down the network they’d already built for us. What’s more, because the network is so robust, there is no down time and we’re confident we don’t lose any valuable footage, which is critical.

Rapier Systems have increased our network capacity, saved us money on telephone bills, and built us a converged network for voice, data, video or whatever arrives next...without digging up a thing. We’re delighted with their service”.
John Kelly, IT Director, Wansbeck District Council