Trade Body / Membership Org

NUMAST industry trade body - Case Study

Background

NUMAST is the acronym for the National Union of Marine, Aviation and Shipping Transport Officers. NUMAST is a trade body, representing shipmasters, officers, cadets and other staff serving in the UK and international fleets and ashore in maritime related industries.

Numast have 2 offices - the head office is in London, with a regional office and a welfare complex in Wallasey, just across the Mersey from Liverpool.

The Challenge

NUMAST had an expensive legacy leased line network consisting of point to point BT Megastream leased lines. NUMAST had adopted a variety of IP based new technologies such as IP telephony and IP video conferencing. These new technologies meant that they needed more bandwidth between their UK sites. NUMAST wanted to increase the bandwidth between their sites but did not want to incur more cost to do so.

The Solution

Managed Communications used their virtual network operator model to deliver low contention high quality SLA backed SDSL connections to London and Wallasey. The SDSL connections were linked by an MPLS backbone network allowing for allocation of bandwith to IP telephony, IP video conferencing and Internet access. A hardware based IPSec VPN security layer was installed on the site premises to ensure the security and integrity of NUMAST's data - this also allowed for the allocation of bandwith to application.

The Benefits

The solution has provided NUMAST with x 32 more bandwidth for less money than the BT point to point BT Megastream network. NUMAST also benefit from free intersite IP calls over a quality of service enabled DSL network. Video conferencing means that workers now no longer have to travel the long distance from London to Liverpool for internal meetings enabling better productivity levels.