Logicalis

The PSBA Network: An integrated Public Sector Network (PSN), and a major step change for future shared ICT and public sector services in Wales.

 

The Client

The Welsh Assembly Government is the devolved government for Wales. Its Ministers and Counsel General are supported by 6,000 Civil Servants working in partnership with 300,000 public sector employees, working across all areas of public life, including health, education and the environment.

The role of the Welsh Assembly Government is to make decisions on these and other areas; to develop and implement public policies; and to propose Welsh laws (Assembly Measures), on behalf of the 3 million citizens of Wales. The Welsh Assembly Government has an annual budget of over £14 billion.

The Challenge

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) networks are fundamental to the delivery of modern public services across the world, carrying crucial information that enables services to be effectively delivered to citizens and linking people, buildings and information through the media of data, voice and video.

Traditionally, public sector organisations have relied on multiple private-sector suppliers and technologies to achieve this goal. But this approach comes at considerable cost, is complex to manage and may not adequately serve the needs of rural locations, of which Wales has many.

In order to overcome these challenges, the Welsh Assembly Government decided to build a single communications and information transport platform, capable of aggregating demand for high-speed connectivity across different public services.

This unified network, it was agreed, would need to take into account the differing bandwidth, security and resilience requirements of the various sites it would support, such as health centres, primary schools, universities, police stations and local government offices. These requirements vary enormously, according to the kinds of work done by individual sites and the nature of data they manage. The new network architecture would also need to connect to other networks outside of Wales.

Between 2004 and 2007, members of the Welsh Assembly Government spent considerable time building the case for a single, next-generation IP-based network, called the Public Sector Broadband Aggregation (PSBA) Network, identifying design requirements and exploring the marketplace.

The Solution

In August 2007, the Welsh Assembly Government signed a £74 million, seven-year contract with Logicalis to build and operate the PSBA network on its behalf. “From its earliest stages, public-sector bodies began moving onto the network and new ones are joining all the time”, says Michael Eaton, Director of the PSBA network for the Welsh Assembly Government.

”The Welsh Assembly didn’t just ask Logicalis for a network architecture that could simply provide adequate bandwidth and some basic upgrades to existing services, according to Tom Kelly, managing director at Logicalis UK. The requirements, he says, were far more complex than that.

“PSBA needed to be designed from the ground up as the strategic communications platform for Wales, supporting the existing and future needs of individual organisations and offering a major step change for future shared ICT and government services,” he says. “The PSBA network architecture had to securely provide services to Health, Local Government, Education and sectors such as Police and blue light services; we were building an aggregated broadband service, but also a multi-sector Public Sector Network, or PSN, fit for future individual and collaborative shared services."

In order to achieve that goal, Logicalis leveraged advanced technologies for network and traffic separation and quality, using building blocks and standards that can be certified and accredited in this multi-sector environment. “It’s only through careful application of MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) technology that we are able to route, protect and prioritise every data packet as it passes through and across the PSBA network,” explains Kelly.

It was also a vital requirement that new sites could be added without the client undertaking complicated configurations and adding expensive routers.

To that end, each ‘customer’ - or public sector body - is provided with its own customer service portal, where authorised employees can view status reports on the parts of the network that they use and for online order processing and tracking. This enables them to input data about their changing network requirements; for example, adding a new site onto the PSBA network.

“Logicalis acts as prime contractor, systems integrator and a specialist national carrier for the public sector in Wales. That’s a heady mix of responsibilities, and it’s a very unusual arrangement between a national government and a private-sector provider, but Logicalis has risen to the challenge admirably,” says PSBA Director Eaton.

The Outcome

Today, PSBA is a true nationwide broadband network architecture, with some 200 points of presence (POPs) across Wales, to which public-sector organisations can connect. It carries a monthly average of around 2.5 petabytes of data, video and voice content and, at present, some 2,000 sites are connected to it. That includes the majority of the NHS in Wales, constituting around 1,000 sites, from the largest hospitals to the smallest General Practitioner (GP) clinics. All of Wales’ universities and further education colleges - a further 60 sites - are connected to PSBA, and all of the country’s 22 local authorities (which are also responsible for its primary and secondary schools) have at least one connection point, typically at their County Hall offices.

Dyfed Powys Police is using PSBA to connect its highly distributed network of small rural police stations. The platform also links the 14 offices of the Countryside Council for Wales, resulting in significant annual savings for the agency, compared to its previous broadband contract. Both these organisations support pre-existing IP voice solutions across the network.

“Now, it’s a question of going deeper and wider,” says Eaton. “Many public sector bodies are currently mid-contract with incumbent suppliers, but when these contracts come to an end, we anticipate that most will be only too willing to migrate to PSBA, because of the savings and efficiencies involved.”

As well as connecting public-sector bodies in Wales with each other, PSBA also integrates with other networks, including the public Internet; JANET, the UK-wide network for further and higher-education institutions; the N3 broadband network for the NHS in England; and GCSx (Government Connect Secure Extranet), which enables local authorities to exchange restricted information with central government departments in Whitehall.

On average, over a five-year period, most organisations see a cost reduction of around 20% over an equivalent private-sector service, according to Eaton. Access to the PSBA network, he adds, has prompted some agencies to start working together on collaborative applications that support cross-agency data-sharing. South Wales Police and Cardiff Council, for example, have built a shared call centre, where police operators and council operators handle calls side-by-side. In this way, emergency 999 calls and non-emergency 101 calls (for reporting street noise and vandalism, for example) can be handled and prioritised by the appropriate personnel. Elsewhere in Wales, two local authorities, a police force, a local education authority and several health centres are planning to reduce IT costs by building a shared data centre that will rely on PSBA for data transport.

The Future

Over the course of the seven-year contract, Eaton expects some 10,000 sites to connect to the PSBA network, including 3,000 homeworkers.

And in the next two years, PSBA’s voice and video services portfolios will undergo significant enhancements. In the case of voice traffic, this will include SIP (session initiation protocol) trunking services, and will allow public sector bodies to take advantage of new presence and availability management services or even deploy fully-fledged unified communications services to vastly reduce current communications costs.

With new additions to video services, a range of visual communications options will be made available, from desktop videoconferencing to full state-of-the-art telepresence suites.

The PSBA architecture has been designed to support emergent requirements with quality-of-service (QoS), Multicast, IPv6, VPLS and flexible security built in from the outset and is the first network of its type in the UK to securely aggregate traffic onto a single network.

It will form the Welsh component of the UK-wide PSN project, scheduled to enter its initial stages in Winter 2010. PSN is an ambitious plan to link public sector organisations across the nation into a single architecture, via multiple, regional networks. PSBA's success as a Direct Network Service Provider (DNSP) will likely make it a useful case study for similar network architecture projects within the UK public sector and sets a high benchmark for such initiatives.

“The Welsh Assembly Government and Logicalis have worked hand-in-hand every step of the way on this project. Its success owes much not only to the technical skill of Logicalis’ staff but also their ability to respond in truly innovative ways to changing requirements,” says Eaton.