Portsmouth City Council has appointed MLL Telecom to provide connectivity for its public buildings to a dark fibre network around the city.
It will run off an infrastructure supplied by City Fibre, with MLL operating a wide area network for voice and data services.
The network will be made available to Portsmouth City Council sites and schools with a minimum bandwidth of 1Gbps and access to Microsoft Azure and the Health and Social Care Network.
MLL said the arrangement could possibly be extended to neighbouring Gosport Borough Council and Southampton City Council.
The company has won the business on a call-off from the Solent Network procurement framework, on which it was awarded exclusivity on three of the four lots. The contract has been partly funded by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport’s Local Full Fibre Network programme.
Flexibility and capacity
Natasha Edmunds director of corporate services at Portsmouth City Council, said: "The Solent Network will give us the flexibility and network capacity we need to support our existing and future digital services.
"A key benefit will be that pupils in Portsmouth schools will be able to access cutting-edge technology and be at the forefront of the latest developments in education. We look forward to working with MLL Telecom as one of the partners in this exciting project.”
Image by Metro Central, CC BY 2.0
Amended on 10.1.20 when initial statement was corrected
