Virgin Media Business has said that the East London NHS Foundation Trust has invested in a new fibre optic network from the company to connect 50 of its sites.
The Trust provides mental health and community health care to people within the City of London and the London Boroughs of Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham.
Virgin Media Business has a nationwide fibre optic network in the UK, carrying 35% of all business broadband traffic.
The company said that by investing in the new network, the trust has boosted reliability and increased speeds for its desktop users fivefold to an average of 10 Megabits-per-second (Mbps).
The trusts’ 3,700 employees can more effectively access applications used to support patient care, said Virgin.
The new managed virtual private network (IPVPN), provided by Virgin Media Business, replaces the BT metro VPN that was based on legacy ATM technology, which provided a maximum of only 34 Mbps to each site compared with 1 Gbps now available, Virgin added.
East London NHS Foundation ICT Manager Jonathan Buchan said it was found that ADSL-based offerings are just not as reliable or as fast as the fibre optic network that Virgin Media Business is providing the trust with.
Buchan continued, "Additionally, the Ethernet VPN offering is the only product on the market that we can use straightaway without customising it or investing our time implementing. The fact that it’s fully managed by Virgin Media Business is also a big help because it means we don’t need to worry about day to day issues and can be assured it will run as it should."
Virgin Media Business head of public sector, health and emergency services David Astley said, "Hosted applications, whether they be in a private or public ‘cloud’ all depend on one thing to work properly – connectivity."
Astley added, "And this needs to be delivered reliably and at high speed. This is the way that computing is going in both public and in private sectors. For NHS Trusts dealing with rapidly changing patient information and in real time there is no alternative but to look at delivering this performance through a high speed, fibre optic Ethernet based IVPN."
