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N3 Broadband migration

All practices are currently linked to N3, the NHS-wide network. The service in place in the majority of practices uses a common Broadband technology called ADSL.

BT, the N3 Service Provider (N3SP) is now planning to upgrade all ADSL-based N3 connections using a high-speed broadband product called IPstream which has been piloted in a number of practices elsewhere in the country and reports the following improvements in bandwidth:

Maximum Stable Rate (MSR)

• Downstream - 70% over 6Mb/s with 100% over 2Mb/s
• Upstream - 95 % over 800kb/s with 100% over 400kb/s

The normal bandwidth on the current service is 1Mb/s downstream and 256Kb/s upstream.

This upgrade is carried out remotely by BT and without replacing existing equipment or an engineer visit ing the practice. In exceptional circumstances there may be up to one hour when the N3 service is down preventing access to the Internet or remote systems, e.g. Choose & Book.

Cath McCarthy, practice manager at Hanham Surgery said: “We found the upgrade process unintrusive and easy with no problems at all. The speed of our N3 service is dramatically faster than before the upgrade, so all in all, a great success!”

The service may take a further ten days to identify and settle at the final optimum speed for your phone line. During this period users may notice broadband speed fluctuations, but these will not drop down to lower than the broadband speed practices currently have.

Dr Andrew Appleton from Courtside surgery in Yate said: “On hearing that our broadband connection was due to be upgraded remotely, I did have some concerns as to whether the process would go as smoothly as claimed...... the process was completely invisible to the practice, we were not aware of any down time, and our email server did not report any failed attempts to connect to the N3 network.

“We were warned that the new service would take up to ten days to optimise, and initially we noticed that some sites appeared to take longer to load. However within a few days this had settled, and we are noticing a significant improvement in performance. We have been very impressed by the smoothness of the process and the improvement in performance.”

When practices are contacted with a date for upgrading, if they have any concerns they will be given the option to postpone their migration to IPstream. However, it is recommended and hoped that practices will agree to proceed with this development.

For more information, please contact Tom Humphreys, migration manager on 0117 900 2561, email: tom.humphreys@aimtc.nhs.uk