Press releases

West Midlands Police locks up more bandwidth with Telewest Business

14th, September 2005. UK’s 2nd largest police force secures faster response time with Evolved Ethernet West Midlands Police has teamed up with Telewest Business to improve communications within the police force across the West Midlands region. The move will ensure all its officers and support staff have high speed access to networked applications that are critical to its day to day operation in policing the area. Seventy two of the police force’s smaller sites have been connected with Telewest Business’ Evolved Ethernet, giving them a 10-fold increase in bandwidth and the ability to handle converged voice, data and video traffic across a high speed network designed to support current and future needs.

As the second largest police force in the country, West Midlands Police serves a population of 2.63 million with 8,057 police officers, supported by 3,882 support staff, 721 special constables and 956 police community support officers. Demands on the service continue to increase with the number of emergency calls received by West Midlands Police more than doubling since 1990. Over the past year West Midlands Police received over 775,000 emergency calls, which has resulted in the requirement for additional bandwidth.

“Ensuring high speed communications within the force is a must if West Midlands Police is going to meet its targets for policing the region,” said Max Corney, Communications Manager ICT Services, West Midlands Police. “As the second largest police force in the UK, our officers are distributed across an area covering over 348 sq miles. Telewest Business was able to put in place the right technology to give us an advanced network that reached out to all our sites and that assured our staff fast response to critical networked applications.” The force is divided into 21 operational command units, which rely on the network to receive information on emergency calls according to their scale from the West Midlands Police central control. Although these already had access to a high-speed network, the smaller sites were experiencing a low response time.

A number of critical applications are accessed by police officers via the network making network availability a key requirement as the demands on West Midlands Police increase. In addition to administrative functions that rely on the network, key networked applications that are needed to support the police force’s operational duties include call management, an intranet that provides intelligence information within the region and the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System (HOLMES). HOLMES links police forces across the UK in a real-time secure environment; to assist in investigations that place across county-boundaries.

“For emergency service organisations that need fast communication to respond quickly to public needs, access to a high speed network is critical,” said Christopher Small, Director for Public Sector, Telewest Business. “The challenge for West Midlands Police was how to connect all its sites across a metropolitan area with a high resiliency network infrastructure that can be controlled dynamically. Organisations need the flexibility to ensure bandwidth is available where it is needed and to support applications with the right availability. Telewest Business’ Evolved Ethernet Services have been designed to meet these needs.” Telewest Business’ Evolved Ethernet services, available from 10 Mbps up to 1 Gbps connection speeds to suit the bandwidth demands of the applications in use, offers West Midlands Police an extremely high-speed networking infrastructure with unparalleled flexibility. The deployment of Telewest Business’ Evolved Ethernet Services also will gives West Midlands Police the network resiliency to future-proof the network for the introduction of new applications such as video conferencing and mobile communication within the police force based on new airwave radio technology.