Bookmaker Coral bets £7m on broadband

Bookmaker Coral is spending £7.1m over the next five years on a broadband managed network to connect its 1,268 UK branches.

Coral's IT support and infrastructure manager Neil McCrossen told silicon.com: "The move is fundamental in terms of migrating our in-shop technology to a single platform to give us more flexibility."

He said national rollouts of new products will be less time-consuming with the new network, which will provide a single secure communications channel for all its suppliers - and will be cheaper than each supplier building in secure communication for every product they provide to the betting chain.

BT is currently rolling out the ADSL network for the bookmaker, based on its MPLS-based IP Clear offering. The deployment will replace Coral's existing narrowband infrastructure and is expected to be complete by February next year.

McCrossen said in a statement: "While only recently deployed, the new infrastructure has already started delivering cost savings against the legacy infrastructure.

"With a consolidated network, we will now be able to overlay new business services and multimedia applications such as VoIP, which previously would not have been cost effective due to high infrastructure costs."