CI-Net fights fire with VPN roll-out

Networking reseller CI-Net is providing fire crews at the Shropshire Fire & Rescue service with a new virtual private network (VPN).

The reseller designed a meshed VPN allowing the headquarters office to communicate with its 21 remote fire station sites in the region.

The Fire and Rescue service’s data is sent to the county’s fire stations over the VPN and downloaded to touch-screen computers. These computers are located on emergency vehicles or appliances via wireless network connections within each station.

Graham Mclean, managing director of CI-Net, said: “The fire service is expecting its communications requirements to increase over time and we’ve focused on creating a cost effective future-proof solution that meets current demand, but also incorporates plenty of flexibility for future expansion ion as new needs emerge.

“The use of load-balancing technology allows us to simply add additional links to cater for any increases in network traffic.”

The CI-Net VPN is a replacement of an older dial-up VPN based on ADSL broadband connections. CI-Net manages the solution from its Oxford Network Operation Centre.

John Rix, network manager at Shropshire Fire and Rescue, said: “The new network is designed to gives us a reliable, resilient infrastructure for the flow of information to the individual stations from our headquarters in Shrewsbury.

“The GIU (graphical information unit), which is based in Shrewsbury, is responsible for adding regular updates to the mapping data covering the region that all fire stations need to maintain. Updates can include essential things like changes in the location of fire hydrants.”

The Shrewsbury HQ is supported by separate connections. The use of two separately load balanced always-on links provides an automatic failover facility for its 150 users.

A firewall from vendor StoneGate protects the network and manages load balancing and failover facilities at the Shrewsbury HQ. The StoneGate and Zyxel routers also ensure traffic between Shropshire Fire and Rescue sites is encrypted.

Rix said previously they had to have someone within the individual fire stations to create a dial-up link to HQ.

“This could be slow and unreliable and we often experienced technical problems. For the on-board computers within our fire vehicles or appliances, we’d written a specific software script to create an automatic VPN connection via wireless access points in the fire stations. But if the VPN didn’t work, we could lose connectivity, delaying the availability of risk data relating to emergency calls,” he said.

Shropshire Fire and Rescue is eventually aiming to replicate all the key data and applications at Shrewsbury to a site in Telford. When this is completed the VPN will allow the fire stations to access critical data from this secondary site if problems are experienced at HQ.

Rix concluded: “We evaluated two other companies when looking for a supplier but were quickly convinced that CI-Net had the technical experience, flexibility and the best understanding of how to meet our requirements, including minimizing the management burden on our own IT Team. So far they’ve delivered.”