Thurrock Council Accelerates Transformation with Flexible WAN

The customer

Thurrock Council serves 175,000 residents in South East England, 20 miles east of central London, north of the Thames.

£5.1m of the council’s £400m budget is invested in meeting complex IT requirements. A wide area network supports the delivery of services at dozens of sites and plays an important role helping staff access many of the unitary authority’s 180 applications. These underpin the council’s financial, planning, child protection, social care, library, education and highway maintenance functions. Many of the council’s network-dependent apps are mission-critical.

Like many local authorities, Thurrock faced significant financial pressure. Despite stagnant budgets, its IT team was tasked with delivering digital transformation, improved cyber protection, enhanced IT resilience, and support for the growing demand for bandwidth and data storage.

The council ran a tender process for its WAN, selecting Syntura as its new provider, based on an innovative WAN design that greatly minimised costs while increasing capacity substantially. Separately, Syntura was chosen to deliver data storage, data backup and IT disaster-recovery services.

The challenge

The council’s increasing reliance on digital workflows and hosted applications made it necessary to replace its old wide area network. The new WAN would need to deliver significant increases in bandwidth, improved resilience, and modern networking equipment.

Thurrock successfully bid for Local Full-Fibre Network (LFFN) grants from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and the Getting Building Fund, on behalf of South Essex councils. However, these grants only covered the cost of installing dark fibre from individual council premises to points close to telephone exchanges. Thurrock needed a WAN supplier that could turn these disjointed links into a functioning WAN spanning not just the 70% of council sites within the LFFN footprint, but the rest of its sites.

To increase network capacity and resilience significantly whilst delivering value for money, the council sought an unusual solution – a hybrid WAN that would seamlessly combine council-owned fibre-optic infrastructure with commercial telecom services. This approach came with its own challenges. It required a bespoke WAN design, close collaboration with a third party fibre maintainer and the housing of WAN equipment within local telephone exchanges.

Ever mindful of cost control, the council was reviewing its property strategy. There was uncertainty over the future of some secondary sites. Any WAN needed to be flexible enough to accommodate a reduction or expansion in the number of sites used by the council, including changes to the council’s key data centres.

At that time, the council’s WAN served schools in addition to offices, making traffic filtering a legal requirement. Any new WAN provider would need to be able to supply web filtering for schools, ideally keeping the existing filtering vendor in place.

The solution

The WAN supplied by Syntura delivered bandwidth upgrades, increased resilience and improved value for money by combining local full-fibre network infrastructure, commercially-operated fibre services and mobile broadband.

Most sites saw significant increases in bandwidth, with the most important sites receiving 10Gbps connections.

Resilience options were available to every location, based on a mix of full-fibre circuits, partial-fibre circuits and mobile broadband.

The WAN provided access to the Public Services Network (PSN) and the Health and Social Care Network (HSCN), enabling council staff to access benefit entitlement information and social care records.

Web filtering for schools continued to be delivered by Thurrock’s preferred vendor, Smoothwall.

The WAN was designed to be future-proof, with spare capacity, so traffic could grow 50% without any change to core network equipment. The new WAN was also IPv6-enabled ensuring the council would never run out of IP addresses.

DDoS protection safeguards the council’s entire WAN, including smaller sites.

Syntura coordinated its installation work with the council’s dark fibre installer, so individual sites’ WAN connections could go live as soon as possible.

The council is able to operate its own fibre-optic network without employing fibre engineers. Syntura acts as the council’s first point of contact for all WAN-related connectivity issues, carrying out technical tests to determine which fibre provider is responsible for fixing a given issue. Syntura engineers supply detailed diagnostic data to facilitate timely fault resolution.

Why Syntura?

Best Financial Bid – The solution saves Thurrock over £1m over the life of the contract, relative to a standard WAN with an equivalent specification.
Best Technical Bid – Syntura was flexible, proposing a bespoke WAN design that accommodated Thurrock’s desire to use dark fibre installed under the LFFN scheme, connect to the PSN and HSCN, protect all sites from DDoS attacks, and filter school internet traffic using Smoothwall technology.

To be more specific…

Local Full-Fibre Network re-use: Syntura helped Thurrock re-use millions of pounds of fibre installed under the Government’s Local Full-Fibre Network programme. Syntura supplied routers for both LFFN-connected and non-LFFN-connected sites, with Thurrock’s LFFN contractor taking responsibility for LFFN circuits, and Syntura augmenting LFFN coverage with additional Openreach circuits.
Network-level DDoS Protection: All council sites are protected against DDoS attacks by upstream defence measures.
PSN Connectivity: Syntura supplied access to the Public Services Network, allowing Thurrock to continue to check benefit entitlement using DWP Searchlight.
HSCN Connectivity: Syntura supplied access to the NHS’s Health and Social Care Network. Syntura was able to do this as it is an HSCN consumer-network service provider.
Prompt Security Patching: Syntura could apply security updates to routers within Thurrock’s desired timescales.
Customer Service: Thurrock felt their previous WAN provider’s customer service had deteriorated following a takeover, and wanted to ensure its new WAN would be properly supported. Syntura proposed monthly in-person service review meetings to ensure any service issues could be discussed and addressed promptly.
24/7 Support: Syntura’s 24/7 support matched the council’s need to operate 24/7.

Benefits

Thurrock Council will save over £1m over the life of the contract, compared to what a typical WAN with matching specifications would have cost. This cost advantage is significant given Thurrock’s IT budget is just over £5 million per year. The council retains the right to use the underlying fibre-optic cables for 15 years, so this is merely an initial saving.

The council’s users experienced fast connectivity and consistent network performance, due to the higher-capacity links to individual council sites, increased backhaul, and increased internet transit. This not only results in faster internet access for staff and visitors but also shorter data backup windows, faster data restoration from offsite backups, and more responsive virtual desktop sessions. The improved speeds available at libraries help the council boost digital inclusion.

The council is able to use an automated offsite backup service, despite backing up over 38 terabytes. If data needs to be retrieved, that retrieval can begin immediately and rapidly – each gigabyte of data taking less than a second to transfer over the WAN.

The ample bandwidth available at each site allows the council to use IP telephony without suffering call quality issues. Council staff can use Microsoft Teams for collaboration, with video calls between sites.

Were the council’s main office to become inaccessible, many of the council’s staff could work from home. The WAN provides plenty of bandwidth to the council’s virtual desktop platform. There’s sufficient bandwidth for staff to temporarily work from secondary council sites without overloading those smaller sites’ networks.

Council staff will notice fewer network outages, as the WAN uses multiple connections to enhance site resilience. WAN traffic is protected from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

The council experiences a single WAN, with the underlying complexity hidden from view. When connectivity issues arise, the council reports them to a single supplier – Syntura – without needing to know who is responsible for the underlying fault. Syntura investigates the issue, liaises with relevant parties and undertakes joint engineer visits where appropriate. Syntura’s diagnostic tests enable the council’s fibre maintainers to quickly estimate the location of fibre faults, expediting fault mediation.

While Thurrock Council provided connectivity services, schools benefited from education-optimised web filtering that safeguarded pupils from problematic content helping schools stay compliant with their legal obligations.

Local government reform makes it likely Thurrock Council will merge with neighbouring local authorities. Thurrock Council is ready – with a WAN design that can be extended to smaller, neighbouring authorities with their own dark-fibre. This will likely result in cost savings.

The council has over 2000 staff, which could have made IP addressing a problem. However, the Syntura-provided WAN supports IPv6 ensuring the council need never run out of IP addresses.

Relevant members of council staff are able to use the WAN to check benefit entitlement via the WAN’s connection to the Public Services Network (PSN). Staff can also check social care records, using the WAN to access the Health and Social Care Network (HSCN).

Customer story