Glasgow Council in £43m network upgrade

E-gov services Glasgow City Council (GCC) is to spend £43m on upgrading its communications infrastructure to provide the city's residents and businesses with e-government services.

The new network will form the hub of the council's Access Glasgow strategy serving citizens within the Greater Glasgow boundary, who make up a fifth of Scotland's population of five million.

"The infrastructure needs to underpin all the services we offer and new ones in future. The upgrade will also save us money that we can use for our front-line services," a council spokeswoman told vnunet.com.

E-government services will be made available to all Glasgow residents and businesses via internet access at home and work and through mobile phones. GCC will also be installing internet-enabled kiosks in public buildings.

Around 800 sites in total, including libraries, community centres and other local authority amenities and services, will be upgraded and all sites networked.

The infrastructure will support multimedia devices, allowing people to contact the council or use its e-government services via text message.

GCC also hopes the new infrastructure will be to provide support for remote working and the development of a new health and social care website.

Alan Stewart, the council's ICT spokesman, said in a statement: "There are massive technological changes occurring across the council. The work undertaken will support other major projects."

Telco Thus, which has been awarded the six to eight-year contract, will replace the existing communications infrastructure with a managed and monitored Ethernet-based converged voice and data network.

This will allow GCC to implement IP telephony services across more than 330 of its most important sites.

As well as giving the council sites high bandwidth internet access, the deal also gives the local authority the option to migrate external voice traffic to IP in the future.

Eddie Cronie, head of national account management at Thus, told vnunet.com: "We should begin work in late April and the upgrade is expected to take around two to three years. However, we are in consultation with the council to see if we can accelerate this roll-out."