Incommunities
Incommunities is one of the largest social housing providers in the UK, provisioning and maintaining affordable high quality housing for rent, shared ownership and for sale to across 22,000 households in the West Yorkshire region.
At a glance
The issue:
The corporate networking infrastructure needed updating to be able to deliver new business critical applications.
The project:
Maintel, utilised their heritage in deploying best of breed networking solutions to provide information on market leading vendors in the LAN and WiFi solutions space, to help install and deliver upon business needs now and in the future for Incommunities.
The outcome:
Provision of a new secure, resilient, redundant Core and edge Extreme network solution, including cloud based Wi-Fi. Enabling both Incommunities staff and customers to access business critical data more effectively and improving on the existing staff and customer experience.
The Background
Maintel worked with Incommunities to understand the current business challenges and pain points within their existing network infrastructure. Maintel held regular technical sessions with the Incommunities team to build a network design and to define what a new network could look like and the benefits it would deliver.
As part of this process, Extreme Networks was deemed best fit to deliver on Incommunities business needs.
The Challenge
A need for a new future proofed network infrastructure that could deliver business critical applications
The legacy Avaya LAN needed a significant upgrade to be capable of provisioning new applications by Incommunities. Utilising the existing fibre infrastructure, Maintel were challenged to design and implement a high speed resilient and redundant network from Core to Edge.
The legacy Juniper Wi-Fi was coming to the end of service life and needed including as part of the go to market refresh. Newer, faster, easier to administer and more feature rich solutions were available and needed evaluating.
Why Maintel
“We approached Maintel to discuss the replacement of our legacy network. Throughout the process, Maintel’s sales and engineering teams worked in partnership with us in a flexible, efficient and effective manner, delivering a high speed, robust, secure Extreme network solution that Incommunities and the customers that we support can truly rely upon, now and in the future.”
Richard Frank, ICT Security and Communications Manager, Incommunities
The Solution
Delivery of a new resilient and redundant Extreme network infrastructure, incorporating LAN and WiFi
Maintel deployed an Extreme Network, utilising Extreme ‘Fabric Networking’ to deliver advanced features and benefits to Incommunities, these included:-
Reducing time to service requirements.Less tolerance for networking down time.Networking Virtualization requirements for Layer 2 (VLAN extensions) and Layer 3 (VRF extensions).Server Virtualization needs in data-centre deployments, requiring a large set of Layer 2 connections (VLANs)Traffic separation requirements in campus deployments, for security purposes, as well as robustness considerations (for instance if contractors, for maintenance reasons, needed access to their equipment or guest access needs).Multi-tenant applications.
Incommunities existing WLAN setup was also replaced with an ExtremeCloud™️ IQ solution, a machine learning and AI driven Wired and Wireless Network Management system, providing for a simplified and intuitive cloud based solution.
This solution furnishes Incommunities with auto-provisioning and full visibility into client and device performance, as well as simplified troubleshooting capabilities and integrated Network Applications, further enhancing their networking infrastructure capabilities.
What are the benefits?
Maintel successfully supported Incommunities in delivering a new fit for purpose, high speed, reliable and secure core Extreme network and WiFi solution, which has already seen significant benefits for the business, for its staff, and for its customers alike.
These include:-
- Increased reliability, enabling staff to operate more effectively and efficiently.
- Increased customer satisfaction through better provisioned bandwidth capacity and security.
- Faster download speeds, helping improve on staff efficiency and customer satisfaction.
- Increased functionality, helping enable staff and customers to operate more efficiently.
- Improved service level support.
Client Testimonial
“As a business we needed a new reliable, future proofed networking solution that could truly support our staff and customers. The Extreme network solution delivers on just that!”
Our Services
We consult on the design, deploy and manage network infrastructures, platforms and software, including our own, that keep ongoing operations running smoothly and dependably.
About Us
Maintel is a communications managed services provider. We use technology to create customer experiences, services and workplaces that inspire and empower people.
Case Studies
We empower our clients across the public and private sector to deliver mission critical services and achieve their workplace, service and customer experience.