New Network Prepares Warwickshire Police for the Future

Warwickshire Police has selected Kingston Communications to provide and manage a new county-wide secure communications infrastructure. The three-year contract valued at just under £4 million, with a potential two-year extension, will provide the force with an advanced data and telephony network and state of the art control room facilities for handling 999 and non-emergency calls. Together they will form a platform for realising the force’s Citizen Focus Programme aim of increasing public satisfaction.

The new network will be built to a uniquely resilient design that makes use of both Kingston’s national network and other carrier networks managed by Kingston to provide improved connections to all police premises throughout Warwickshire. The network will carry all of the force’s communications traffic including voice, data and CCTV images. The Nortel technology at the core of the network makes full use of Internet Protocol (IP) telephony for the transport of all voice calls.

The new infrastructure will replace ageing and currently separate data and telephony networks and is already operational at the pioneering new Warwickshire Justice Centre in Nuneaton. The country’s first justice centre of its kind, this brings together the Police, Crown Prosecution Service, Magistrates’ Courts, Probation Service, Youth Offending Team and related services such as Victim and Witness Support to deliver improved services to the community and particularly victims and witnesses of crime.

The network design also incorporates a new, resilient control room solution for handling 999 and non-emergency calls that will bring much greater flexibility to call management and processing and therefore help the force to achieve its Citizen Focus programme objectives.

In addition to designing and implementing the network, Kingston is providing a managed service under which it will take full responsibility for 24-hour/365-day monitoring, fault fixing and change management to stringent service levels. This will enhance network resilience, help the force to predict expansion requirements, allow its IT teams to focus on core activities and assist in budgetary planning.

Richard Elkin, Head of IT, Warwickshire Police said: "Having a robust, high-performance communications infrastructure is essential to meeting the ever-increasing demands of modern policing. Warwickshire has taken pre-emptive steps to modernise its infrastructure and introduce levels of performance and resilience that will satisfy force requirements well into the future. We are investing heavily in systems that support our officers and staff in carrying out their work and by doing so we are demonstrating again our commitment to making Warwickshire the safest place to be. Kingston Communications was awarded the contract following a rigorous tendering process and has risen to the challenge of designing a platform to meet our exacting standards."

Tony Cox, Director, Public Sector for Kingston Communications said: "Through successful participation in regular competitive reviews, we have maintained our relationship with Warwickshire Police for over 15 years. This project moves the force into a new era, bringing voice, data and video communications together as a secure, converged, IP-based infrastructure, which we are delivering as a fully managed solution. Managing this type of network presents some very specific challenges and the investments in new systems and technology that Kingston is making in its Managed Service Centre will be pivotal to the service we will provide to the force."

Kingston Communications has a long history of serving public sector organisations, and counts 23 of the 43 police authorities in England and Wales as customers.

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Note to editors:
About the Kingston Communications Group

Kingston Communications is a leading provider of communications solutions, providing a wide range of voice, data, internet and contact centre services to businesses and public sector organisations throughout the UK.

Kingston is a converged communications company with expertise and experience in both telecommunications and enterprise networking, supported by its own 2200km broadband network. As such, it is ideally positioned to meet the infrastructure, equipment and connectivity requirements of modern organisations, for whom communications is a strategic consideration.

Kingston’s national capabilities have been built on its strong foundations within East Yorkshire, where the company has been providing leading edge services to residential and business customers for over 100 years and where it has been a pioneer in the use of ADSL technology.

In December 2004 Kingston acquired 100% of the shares of Omnetica Holdings Ltd, specialists in the provision of converged IP networks.

The Kingston Group also includes Eclipse Internet, an established and growing broadband ISP that delivers internet connectivity and services to businesses and consumers throughout the UK.

For further information, please contact:
Claire Thompson
Zed PR
T: 0118 944 0394
E: claire@zedpr.co.uk

Judith Parsons
Kingston Communications
T: 01924 882870
E: Judith.parsons@kcom.com

John Stack
Media and PR Projects Officer
Warwickshire Police
T: 01926 415134
E: john.stack@warwickshire.pnn.police.uk