Broadband boosts building society's network

Britannia Building Society has upgraded its network to broadband to cope with the increase in traffic created by the new applications it is rolling out.

The UK's second biggest building society, Britannia was spurred into the network update by the prospect of cost savings - and the possibilities of new services that the building society could offer over the expanded bandwidth.

While its legacy network wasn't causing problems, Britannia decided to put a very short timescale on the network update project, completed late last year, to start reaping the benefits as soon as possibly.

Tom Salt, network manager for Britannia told silicon.com: "We were doing more and more applications - it could start to affect network performance. We wanted to be ahead of the game and we didn't want to get to the point where there were problems."

After a tender process, Britannia chose BT as their supplier, having earlier conducted a two-month pilot of ADSL with the telco.

Salt said the company picked BT for the rollout on the grounds of cost but also because of its "ability to deliver very quickly", with Britannia needing its supplier to design and roll out the upgrade in eight week.

BT's staff worked alongside Britannia's own engineers to upgrade the existing 64Kbps lines, and all the work was done outside of normal branch hours to make sure there was no disruption to customers.

The work was carried out four nights per week, with eight branches getting upgraded per night.

Salt said there were only minor disruptions to service as a result of the network changeover. "There were one or two branches offline for a couple of hours in the early morning out of the 188; it went that slickly".

"There were one or two areas where we had to wait a month or two to get ADSL because the exchange had to be upgraded but that was all planned for," he added.

The building society projects that the upgrade will save it £1.5m within three years.

The company is also now looking at possible future applications for its new network, including voice over IP and videoconferencing.

And while Britannia hasn't green-lighted any of the technologies yet, "there are various initiatives bubbling away", Salt said.

But the upgrade has already led to more tangible benefits for average staff, including less time spent waiting for mortgage and other decisions for customers. "They are seeing a definite improvement in response times," he said.

The expanded bandwidth also means email attachments will no longer cause bottlenecks in the system. "Before, we had to throttle [the network] back so we didn't kill the bandwidth - certain things that didn't go through before we can allow now," Salt added.