The ClientSouthampton is the principal city in central Southern England. With 86 primary, secondary and special schools in the area, the Council has a school population of around 29,000 pupils between the ages of 3 - 19 years. Southampton City Council has identified Information Technology as a key focus for schools in the area, in terms of skills, connectivity and content. Consequently, digital literacy is now a priority alongside literacy, numeracy and emotional literacy.
The Challenge
Information Technology was identified by Southampton City Council as a key focus for schools in the area in terms of skills, connectivity and content. This focus, coupled with the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) directive to ensure that all primary schools were connected to the Internet at a minimum of 2Mbs and all secondary schools connected at 8Mbs by 2006, resulted in Southampton City Council contracting Redstone Managed Solutions to upgrade the Internet connections of all schools in the area from ISDN lines to Broadband.
Southampton City Council has a core network based within the civic centre which acts as the heart of the network, the schools feed back into this creating a typical star topology network.
Tariq Saied Managing Director, Redstone Managed Solutions comments: “The Wide Area Network solution was recommended primarily because it is not only provides much more bandwidth but it is also much more economical than the ISDN solution. This solution provides each school in Southampton with a 10Mb broadband connection, 2Mb more than the Government requires for secondary schools and 8Mb above the Primary school target as well as the facility to easily upgrade to 1Gb if requirements change.
Karen Mitchell, Southampton City Council is very pleased with the positive and proactive relationship the Council and Redstone have established. She explains:
“Redstone Managed Solutions’ representatives are always helpful and proactive in bringing potential issues and problems to our attention and dealing with them in a speedy and efficient manner. Constant contact with our Account Manager and, in addition, an assigned Project Manager who has worked each phase of the project has also proven very helpful. “
We are very happy with the service we have received from Redstone. As well as advising and supporting existing technologies, Redstone has been proactive in bringing to our attention new technologies and making us aware of the benefits and relevance of these in our LEA, enabling us to make considerable savings in terms of ongoing revenue costs.”
The complexities of communicating across multiple sites with an outdated infrastructure led RIBA Enterprises to review its telecommunications set-up. Redstone, a national provider of IT and communications solutions, was appointed to deploy the new technologies
Karen Mitchell, ICT Strategy and Development Manager for Education and Leisure Services, Southampton City Council
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