The background

South West Communications Group provides Westlands School in Torquay, Devon, with a local area network (LAN) and a scalable, flexible telephone system to cope with the demands placed on a large school.

Westlands School was established in 1973, and is a popular, thriving 11 to 18 co-educational bilateral school for 1,350 students.

The challenge

Westlands School was an existing South West Communications Group customer having already invested in a Toshiba telephone system in 2001. The School was keen to upgrade this system to incorporate the advances made in digital technology and to make use of improved functionality.

The School also wanted to upgrade its existing data network to befit its status as a beacon for technology. As technology advances, educational establishments will have an increasing reliance on their networks especially as on-line exams, classroom video presentations, etc become more prevalent. Therefore it will become key that the School’s data network is both secure and reliable to support these current and emerging requirements

Westlands’ existing unmanaged network comprised equipment from a number of different vendors and there was no support infrastructure in place. Being unmanaged network switches meant the School had no control over its own network, which meant it could be easily compromised in terms of security as well as being difficult to maintain.

The legacy LAN had also become too slow to meet its data requirements and offered no way of identifying the source of any faults. A fault on this unmanaged network meant the entire network could potentially go down whereas a fault on a managed network can be quickly isolated and resolved leaving the rest of the network available for use.

Therefore, the School had decided to seek a fully managed service to relieve its IT staff from the responsibility of the network and to therefore entrust it to the care of a third party provider. The School sought several quotes for the separate voice and data network elements before selecting South West Communications Group as its single solution provider.

The solution

South West Communications Group designed and installed an Alcatel-Lucent LAN and the Toshiba Strata IP-CIX670 telephone system in a single solution that included: 

• Fully managed replacement LAN
• Upgraded Toshiba telephone system
• Automated attendant to relieve the pressure put on reception staff at peak times
• Virtual pigeon holes to improve the message taking process
• Tannoy messages
• System management software
• Installation during school holidays
• Maintenance and support

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