Case Study

The Medical House, Sheffield

Profile

The Medical House PLC is a Sheffield based group of companies which specialises in the design, development, licensing and supply of innovative medical devices for global pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry clients.

The Medical House's activities are primarily focused on drug delivery technologies and its development and project management capabilities are supported by in-house design and rapid prototyping facilities.

Founded in 1998, The Medical House was admitted to London Stock Exchange's Alternative Investment Market (A.I.M.) in 2000.

Challenge

The Medical House was using a 2 Mb ADSL line supporting their office-based team and a few mobile workers, who access email and files stored on the office server via the company’s VPN.

As it grew, the Medical House began to find that the ADSL line no longer provided adequate upload capacity to support its needs. In order to keep pace with the increasing bandwidth demands of a growing business, to facilitate increasing numbers of mobile workers accessing business critical files in real time, whilst simultaneously supporting its office based team, the company decided it would make a change to its internet access provision.

Solution

To meet its needs, The Medical House replaced their ADSL connection with a 1 Mb symmetrical fixed wireless link (FWA) from On-Communications. This service allows it to ‘burst’ to twice their contracted speed during busy periods, giving the company a 2Mb connection when they need it, at no extra cost.

On-Communications’ service is delivered via a dedicated wireless connection. It does not touch BT Openreach’s congested cables and exchanges, and provides 1:1 contention and a 99.5% SLA. The service is, by nature, reliable and secure, and is delivered via the world’s largest wholly owned IP network.

Built for business, On-Communications’ service has been designed from the outset to support applications such as VPN and hosted e-commerce. It is flexible and scalable; as The Medical House’s business continues to develop On-Communications service can grow to meet its changing needs, easily scaling to speeds of 2 Mb or 4 Mb, although the network is capable of delivering speeds of up to 100 Mb.

Result

On-Communications’ symmetrical service provides equal bandwidth for both upload and download, supporting The Medical House’s mobile workers and office team.

James Tingle, IT Manager for The Medical House, said, “We needed an economic system that would give us the functionality we needed and On-Communications have met all our requirements.

“We now have a number of mobile workers connecting to the network via the VPN at any one time and our office team is unaffected. Our mobile workers are mostly senior management and project managers and their professionalism and productivity when on the road has been enhanced by being able to retrieve the information they want, whenever they want it.

“Having outgrown our original ADSL line, we needed a flexible and reliable system to replace it and we have been very pleased with the resiliency of On-Communications’ service and ability to ‘burst’ for extra bandwidth.”

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