Westminster City Council yesterday officially opened its corporate communications network for use in Westmin-ster Town Hall and two subsidiary buildings, with Lady Porter, the Leader of the Council, claiming this represents a new era in local government value-for-money service. The initial UKP800,000 deal – which later rose to UKP1.25m as the project became more ambitious – was clinched by Maidenhead, Berkshire-based Ungermann-Bass Ltd last year, and has resulted in the installation of an Ethernet networking system currently linking 900 nodes, expanding to 1,200 nodes by the end of the year. The decision to install Ethernet took into account the existing machines at the town hall, which apart from various IBM equipment – the 3090 mainframe, System 36, System 38, XT and AT personal computers – includes DEC PDP-11 and VAX, Honeywell, Xios and McDonnell-Douglas machines: for this reason it was felt that the IBM Cabling System would not give the range of communications required. The Ungermann-Bass Net/One Local Area Network supports Ethernet V2, 802.3, 802.5 Token Ring and Broadband, and is built around two central spines in the town hall, one of which supports the main one in case of damage, with rings coming off these spines at each of the 20 floors. This enables data to be accessed at the front desk, where payments and queries are dealt with, from any part of the building where data is processed – thus resulting in a faster, more accurate service. A fibre-optic link, operating at a speed of 10Mbps like the rest of the network, can then take this information to two other administrative buildings nearby. Apart from the greater interconnection expected from the introduction of Net/One, the council foresees easier relocation of equipment and staff, and something to please the Westminster ratepayer – reduced costs. Ungermann-Bass, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tandem Computers, also supplies the more advanced Access/One Local Area Network, which uses unshielded telephony structured wiring and can be built on to an existing Net/One system: Westminster has plans to incorporate Access/One in the near future.
