South Wales Fire and Rescue Service enhances fire prevention and efficiency with wireless network

Customer challenge

South Wales Fire and Rescue Service receives more than 50,000 emergency calls every year and attends around 26,000 incidents. To notify firefighters of these emergencies, improve fire prevention and increase efficiency, the organisation needed to improve network connectivity to its 50 fire stations, which was reliant on legacy technology.

Computacenter solution

Computacenter helped the fire authority test, design and deploy a point-to-point wireless broadband network. Based on a Cisco backbone, the £1.5 million network also supports VoIP, which will help the organisation save £100,000s on communication costs. The wireless network has been designed as a shared service and is already being used in conjunction with a local council.

Results

South Wales Fire and Rescue Service can now take advantage of web technologies and email, which helps to improve efficiency and service levels to the community. Crucially, the network enables better access to information, which means firefighters can keep their skills up-to-date more easily; the authority can plan fire prevention and education sessions according to community needs and resources can be matched to demand.

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Customer profile

Making South Wales a safe place to live, work and visit
Every day, firefighters in South Wales attend more than 70 incidents – from chip pan fires and road traffic accidents to refuse fires and car arson attacks. These incidents are among 50,000 emergency calls received by South Wales Fire and Rescue Service every year.

The organisation's 1,700 staff, 50 fire stations and central control room serve a population of approximately 1.5 million people spread across more than 1,000 square miles. The authority's £69 million annual budget is spent both on providing a rapid emergency response and reducing the risks facing the community.

Fire prevention and education is a key part of this – the organisation attended nearly 2,000 deliberate vehicle fires in the 12-month period ending March 2006, and received 900 malicious false alarms.

Business challenge

Making the connections between remote fire stations
To ensure it can continue to provide an excellent service to local people, South
Wales Fire and Rescue Service needs to be able to:

• Train its 1,000 operational firefighters in the latest rescue techniques
  
• Allocate firefighting resources according to daily requirements
  
• Maintain close communication links with the community
  
• Understand the education and prevention priorities in different areas
  
• Meet the Welsh Assembly Government's goals for efficient and cost-effective public service delivery

With limited network bandwidth, the organisation was unable to take full advantage of email or its intranet to help achieve these goals. As Chris Williams, Head of ICT for South Wales Fire and Rescue Service, explains: "Traditionally, fire stations have not required IT or fast network connectivity, so we have relied on ISDN and, at some sites, a metro virtual private network (VPN). With more and more data being shared electronically, however, we realised that poor network bandwidth would limit our ability to launch new initiatives, such as e-Learning for firefighters, and deliver on our vision for a safer South Wales."

Although the metro VPN provided some fire stations with a throughput speed of 256Kbps, the costs of the solution were growing all the time as the organisation's bandwidth requirements increased. "We needed to implement a cost-effective and reliable communications infrastructure that could support the use of web-enabled applications by firefighters at remote locations," comments Chris.

Computacenter solution

Enhanced connectivity with point-to-point wireless network
To understand the networking options available, South Wales Fire and Rescue Service turned to existing IT partner Computacenter. As Chris explains: "Computacenter guided us through the different technology options, and suggested implementing a wireless local area network (WLAN) with data and voice running over IP."

As this was a new concept for the fire authority, Computacenter helped to run a pilot to validate the performance of VoIP and a point-to-point wireless network. Following the successful pilot, Computacenter went on to source the technology for the full solution and managed the roll-out end-to-end, working with specialist partner Network by Wireless.

The resulting WLAN, which provides a 10Mbit/s link to full-time fire stations and 2Mbit/s to part-time sites, is based on:

• Cisco Unified Communications Manager
  
• Cisco routers and switches
  
• Multiple wireless radio technologies

Computacenter specifically designed the network to ensure that bandwidth could be shared with other public sector organisations, as per the country's 'Making the Connections' agenda.

Rob Sainsbury, an Enterprise Solutions Manager for Computacenter, commented: "By using standardised protocols and Cisco technology, we have been able to create a platform that can be easily integrated with other public sector WLANs." South Wales Fire and Rescue Service has already joined forces with Rhondda-Cynon-Taf Council to create a shared network, and is talking to three more local authorities about how to maximise the potential of the WLAN.

The network currently provides connectivity to more than 40 fire stations across South Wales, and is used to alert fire stations to emergency incidents and to route all telephone calls. With the WLAN playing such a critical role in the fire service's day-to-day operations, it is important that the infrastructure is highly available and supported. Computacenter is providing 24x7 management via its partner Network By Wireless, and ensured in-built resilience by using triangulation to prevent a single point of failure at the network core.

Results

Providing firefighters with the skills and information they need to save lives

Although the WLAN required an initial investment of £1.5 million by South Wales Fire and Rescue Service, the deployment was highly cost-effective and will deliver ongoing savings. As Chris confirms: "The other options we looked at would have cost five times as much to deliver the same level of performance. By using the WLAN to converge our data and voice traffic, we will be able to save £100,000s over the coming years on communication costs."

In addition to the financial benefits, the WLAN has also enabled South Wales Fire and Rescue Services to enhance operational efficiency and the services it provides to the local community.

Increased sustainability: More forms can now be completed electronically, which reduces manual effort and the use of paper.

Better training for firefighters: e-Learning and web-enabled personal development schemes can now be used rather than relying on CDs being updated and circulated to each fire station.

More efficient allocation of resources: South Wales Fire and Rescue Service can now check on staffing levels at individual fire stations electronically. This process used to be carried out by three members of staff telephoning each site every day.

Faster access to safety information: Firefighters can now download material, such as chemical attributes and operating procedures, from the organisation's intranet within seconds instead of having to wait several minutes. Risk assessments can also be submitted via email rather than by post, which means firefighters have access to the latest information about site hazards when attending an incident.

Improved fire prevention: Station commanders can use web-enabled mapping tools to identify risks and trends within local communities and carry out appropriate fire education and prevention sessions.

Thanks to these improvements, firefighters in South Wales are now better equipped to provide an emergency response, raise fire awareness and reduce risk. "The wireless broadband network will give firefighters better and faster access to the information they need to provide a proactive service," comments Chris. "Computacenter played a key role in helping us maximise the latest wireless technologies to create a communications infrastructure that will support us and other public sector organisations in South Wales."