Hospitals, Doctor Surgeries, and Dental Practices rely heavily on connectivity for phone systems, security systems, specialist equipment, healthcare-specific systems and programs and even transmitting key files across your network such as x-rays or test results and them be seen by the right Doctors or Dentists, quickly so they can deliver outcomes to patients.
Downtime can be disastrous, particularly if it affects equipment that helps determine life-threatening illnesses.
Your broadband and wi-fi needs to be adaptable and flexible to your needs but ultimately, it needs to be reliable.
Strong connectivity means an increase in:
Productivity – Efficiency – Happy Patients (and Staff) – Resiliency
Which broadband option is best for a Dental Practice, Doctor Surgery or Hospital?
There is no definitive answer as it depends on what you intend to use over the circuit, number of staff stationed at the site and number of connected devices.
The majority of dental practices and doctor surgeries would be fine with FTTC or FTTP.
Larger medical centres would be better off with an Ethernet 100Mbps bearer.
Ethernet services are dedicated, uncontended broadband services with guaranteed bandwidth, synchronous speeds and SLA’s.
Unlike Broadband, Ethernet was designed for businesses, not the residential market. Its key advantage lies in its use of dedicated high capacity fibre optic lines.
Fibre Broadband (FTTC / FTTP)
FTTC is Fibre to the Cabinet is where fibre-optic cable is used from the telephone exchange to the green, roadside cabinet and then, copper cable to the business. FTTC can achieve speeds of up to 76Mbps for downloads and 19Mbps for uploads.
FTTP is Fibre to the Premise is where fibre-optic cables are used to transmit from the exchange all the way to the business’s premises. FTTP provides bandwidths of up to 1Gbps for downloads and 50Mbps for uploads.
Single Order Generic Ethernet Access (SoGEA)
You can get contended and uncontended services with SOGEA. The bandwidth is asynchronous, however with SOGEA Ethernet you can have an uncontended synchronous 20Mbps / 20Mbps service, but this is dependent on your distance from the street cab.
Speeds up to 80Mbps
Fibre Ethernet
Uncontended, guaranteed high-speed bandwidth and uptime and a SLA.
Fibre Ethernet uses bearers. Bearers are the bandwidth size of the available circuit, it’s the maximum speed that the circuit can go up to. With Fibre Ethernet you can get 100Mbps bearers and add on block of 10Mbps, 1Gbps bearers and add on blocks of 100Mbps up to 500Mbps then after 1Gbps or 10Gbps bearers that you can add on blocks of 1Gbps.
Speeds: From 10Mpbs up to 10Gbps
Ethernet Flex 1Gbps
As a City Fibre Champion, we are able to offer the competitive Ethernet Flex 1Gbps solution. It is changing the perception that anything above a standard broadband connection is expensive. With Ethernet Flex you have an uncontended service with guaranteed bandwidth of 200Mbps up and done, with 1Gbps at no extra cost.
You also have unlimited usage and its on-demand bandwidth which means there is no need for portal requests.
Speeds: Guaranteed 200Mbps with 1 Gbps burst.
Converged Ethernet Options
Dedicated, uncontended with guaranteed bandwidth speeds and SLA’s.
Converged Ethernet is the fully managed variant of standard Ethernet and combines both Voice and Data on a single high-speed connection prioritising all voice traffic to guarantee the number of concurrent calls required and quality, without degradation of the service during periods when traffic usage on your circuit could be in high utilisation.
With Converged Ethernet you get dedicated, uncontented, guaranteed bandwidth speeds and SLA’s.
Benefits of Ethernet
- Dedicated, uncontended bandwidth – Our Ethernet solution has high availability and low latency connectivity.
- Voice and data convergence – You can merge voice and data using our Fibre Ethernet which means a significant cost saving for most businesses.
- 24/7 monitoring and helpdesk – We can respond immediately to any issues and ensure consistency in performance.
- Service Level Agreement – We offer competitive SLA’s to cover delivery, performance, availability and fix times.
- Resilient failover – We offer a resilient failover by ensuring there is a failover at your premises and resilient network links via DSL (ADSL and FTTC) /4G / Ethernet (FTTC / EFM /Fibre (R2 link).
- Maximise productivity – With uncontended bandwidth, you can increase productivity as you can be assured that you always have access to essential business applications and files.
- High-Bandwidth connectivity – We can deliver up to 10GBps connection using fibre optic technologies
- Improve site-to-site connectivity – An ethernet connection is essential if you are looking to improve site-to-site connectivity.
Enter your details into our Connectivity checker to see what solutions are available for your business
Secure, Resilient Business Wi-Fi in Healthcare
You need good, reliable wi-fi when you have specialist equipment which depends on the connectivity, especially any portable machinery.
Strong Wi-Fi connectivity means an increase in:
Collaboration –Productivity – Profitability – Efficiency – Happy Staff and Visitors
Advantages of Wi-Fi in Healthcare
Wi-Fi when used internally, it can increase productivity and enhance collaboration by the following:
- No desk restrictions – your staff can pick their laptop or device up and move to another consultation room or perhaps a conference room and still remain connected. Ultimately, it means they aren’t tethered to one location when their job could take them all over your site.
- Increase Collaboration – a huge benefit if staff can take x-rays, bloodwork or other test results to show a colleague, perhaps for a second opinion without being restricted by a fixed device.
- Operate Collaboration tools – such as the ability to connect to AV technology to present presentations to internal or external people, perhaps in auditoriums or training rooms.
- Simple Infrastructure – you are no longer dictated to by wires and cables when your departments grow or when you have an influx of visitors.
What is a Public Wi-Fi network?
Public Wi-Fi network is essentially opening your wi-fi network to the public so that everyone can access it. A Public Wi-Fi network is ideal for a hospital, dental practice or doctor surgery because it is a physical location where visitors will be spending a substantial amount of time so you are able to use this to convey important messages but also, keep them occupied so they don’t “clock-watch”.
There are of course, security risks to consider which is why as a key rule you should keep all operations on a separate network specifically for internal users.
How secure is Wi-Fi?
Wi-Fi security is a significant concern for dental practices, doctor surgeries and hospitals and it should be but you shouldn’t reject the idea of going wireless when there are things that can be put in place to minimise your risk.
One of the simple security measures we can do is install a wireless Local Area Network (LAN), which will require a pass code, so only approved members of staff will be able to access the connection.
As far as Wi-Fi security, specifically, we utilise the following products which mean that you have a strong and resilient network:
- Policy Enforcement Firewall – with deep packet inspection to ensure that each connection and user session is secure. Unlike traditional firewalls, our next-gen mobility firewall is aware of user roles, device types and app flows.
- Wireless Intrusion Protection – throughout your network to prevent denial-of-service, man-in-the-middle and other security threats. There is no need to separate RF sensors and security appliances.
- Policy Management – identifies all devices and users so that if an unknown device tries to connect, it is rejected and you are notified.