MLL Telecom Win Nottinghamshire Wide Area Network Contract

Business ISP MLL Telecom has today announced that they’ve been chosen by Nottinghamshire County Council as the sole UK supplier for a regional 4-year framework and the related provision of Wide Area Network (WAN) services (site-to-site and site-to-internet/cloud connectivity). The framework has a value of £250m.

The council has made an immediate call-off contract for its own WAN network upgrade. The deployment of this regional core network will also include a Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) pilot, which it’s hoped will help to improve network performance (e.g. lower latency).

The upgrade itself is scheduled for completion in 2020 and will include both Health and Social Care Network (HSCN) and Public Sector Network (PSN) connections, with the option to add additional services such as SIP trunks and VoIP.

The new regional core network will replace the Council’s legacy incumbent network and will be made available to more than 200 sites in the area including, but not limited to, corporate sites, arms-length organisations and healthcare partners.

MLL Telecom will then carry out an SD-WAN pilot this summer, in advance of the full WAN deployment. The pilot will be run across a select number of council sites to assess the technology’s performance against a traditional WAN, with the ultimate goal of meeting the Council’s latency requirement of less than 20ms (milliseconds).

Nigel Stevenson, Nottinghamshire County Council, said:

“Access to reliable and resilient connectivity is of vital importance to Nottinghamshire’s public sector organisations. Technology plays an important role in improving operational efficiencies, but only if we have the right underlying connectivity to support it. We chose MLL Telecom based on its clear capability to improve network connectivity in the area and meet our latency requirement while delivering an SD-WAN trial that we are keen to explore.”

Gail Harvey, MLL Telecom’s Business Development Director, said:

“We are thrilled to have been awarded the contract to deploy a regional core network for Nottingham County Council. The new network will be key to futureproofing the Council’s connectivity and will be able to support more, varied services. We’re excited to be bringing our expertise and experience to the project, and are also looking forward to the results of the SD-WAN pilot.”

The ISP also intends to work with the Enterprise Telecoms division of SSE, which is currently in the process of significantly expanding its fibre optic network reach and will also support MLL with the unbundling of several BT exchanges (i.e. enable access to local 10Mbps – 10Gbps Ethernet services on 100Gbps backhaul).