A large organisation providing housing and support services to vulnerable people who may have been marginalised or at risk from homelessness.
They believe that everyone deserves a safe and secure place to live and provide tailored packages for young people, care leavers, women, ex-service personnel and people coming out of prison. They support over 2200 vulnerable people every night with housing.
The Customer Challenge
Many if not all residents are on social benefits such as Universal Credit. All these services plus other support services are now predominantly accessed via the internet. The organisation set out a planned investment for Wi-Fi in all their housing to enable residents to access support services such as DWP websites.
The organisation sits in the 3rd sector delivering essential services to improve people’s wellbeing to enable them to make a valued contribution to society. They have not previously invested in technology in their housing estate and therefore they have taken a cautious approach are they roll out the services, but based on the resident feedback have continued to invest. They have over 220 sites where the service were deemed appropriate and all of them needed to delivered within a programme to align with all stakeholders.
No infrastructure had previously been rolled out to their housing estate. The residents cannot have visits from engineers without supervision from the support workers who know them. This means all visit to the housing sites are supervised and support provide by the organisation.
Sensitive deployment working with the organisation on the priority sites. Securely locating equipment to ensure robustness and lower cost of ownership. Due to the transient nature of the residents (i.e. they may only be in the premises for a few weeks) it was important that the service was deployed as a managed service to make sure it was working as change happened. Strong communications with all stakeholders were important throughout the deployment between Openreach, the service provider and the end customer.
Technical Challenge and Solution
The properties varied in size and complexity so the solution was designed to be scalable but with common components. Equipment such as the router was housed in cabinets for containment, security and tamper prevention. The Wi-Fi was filtered in ensure only sites to support resident were accessible, removing harmful or inappropriate content. All sites were surveyed before installation, backhaul delivery points identified for Openreach and Access Point locations planned to maximise coverage with associated cabling.
The solution was agreed between the service provider and the customer to meet their objectives of providing a managed Wi-Fi solution throughout their housing stock to deliver a reliable, robust service to their residents. Implementation had to be tailored to the access requirements of the customer and their residents.
The solution was based around Cisco equipment typically a C927-4P router, Catalyst 3560-CX 12 port switches (where required) and C9105AXI-E 802.11ax access points (Wi-Fi 6). Cabinets were typically 6U wall mounted with 6 way PDU , shelf and cable management. As these were greenfield sites there was no need of integration to existing infrastructure.
Due to the vulnerable nature of many of the residents’ content filtering was applied across a range of categories e.g. Drugs, Gambling, Pornography etc. These were tested as part of the post installations checks and included in the site reports.
Project Delivery
The project was deployed over a long period of time to enable the end customer to gain resident feedback and confidence in the solution with checkpoints along the way.
Key in delivery was close co-ordination between the service provider, Openreach and ITI Network Services to make sure delivery failures were minimised and no need for expensive revisits. The pre installation surveys were used to not identify suitable locations for the access points, but importantly a secure location for the circuit from Openreach to be delivered to in a residential environment.
Planning with all stakeholders is key to successful delivery of the service, identifying the key process changes required.
Sensitivity to the needs of the end customer and their residents is key for stakeholder management, an example being the noise issue outlined earlier.
The Project was completed on time and delivered within scope combined with the agreed pre / post surveys and reporting, wrapped with excellent communications resulting in delighted residents, the housing association and consequently the Service Provider.
Some properties have had to be revisited subsequently after resident inflicted damage to Cabinets etc. The key learning is to focus on locating services where they are least obtrusive and ensuring fixings are as robust as possible within the environment.
Reference: Danny Ruler – BT Wi-Fi
Outcome and Feedback
Resident feedback was very positive around the service provided fulfilling the objectives of the organisation.
An initial 109 sites were delivered successfully leading to the placing of orders for a further 64 sites working towards all sites having the service within the coming year.
Roll out were delivered within agreed timescales and budget with the Service Provider and End Customer.
The organisation was delighted with the service and have extended it to 12 of their educational sites covering classrooms etc. This was initially out of scope but bought in due to the positive feedback on the initial housing deployments.
