News
Gloucestershire NHS Trust deploys Aruba wireless network
2 November 2009
Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has installed a
wireless network from Aruba Networks to support the use of mobile
applications at the Gloucestershire Royal and Cheltenham General
Hospitals.
Aruba’s 802.11n high-speed networks have also been deployed in the
administrative offices of NHS Gloucestershire to support data access,
wireless voice over IP and guest connectivity. The network is supplied,
installed and supported by Aruba Platinum Partner, Vanix.
“Our priority is to deliver an infrastructure that enables
improvement in clinical care,” said Steve Edwards, head of IT
development services at Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
“It is generally recognised that mobile access to applications and
services improves efficiency in a clinical environment — saving several
hours a week of clinical time. That equates to clinicians seeing more
patients, spending more time with patients, and patients spending less
time waiting for treatment.
"The Aruba network is the cornerstone of a flexible IT infrastructure
that allows us to deploy mobile applications whether it is based on
imaging (PACS), data (administration applications) or voice over IP.”
Adaptive Radio Management (ARM) technology lowers deployment and
maintenance costs by automating site surveys and using
infrastructure-based controls to optimise the performance of Wi-Fi
clients in real-time. This feature simplifies the work of the Trust’s IT
team; installation of access points is done by a single technician, and
the automated RF management feature ensures faultless performance
despite a plethora of neighbouring consumer wireless networks.
“Aruba won our technical evaluation on all points,” continued
Edwards. “In practice, the Aruba equipment is ‘self contained’; it goes
in and works the first time. It doesn’t need any tweaking by our staff,
and as a result has a low total cost of ownership. From an architectural
viewpoint, ARM is a better solution than a single channel model, both
with regard to interference mitigation and because it’s standards based
and not proprietary. The proof is in the deployment results – our
implementation team find the Aruba wireless LAN easy to deploy, highly
reliable, and readily scalable.”
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