Thurrock District Council Upgrades Infrastructure

Thurrock is a unitary authority in Essex that lies along the north bank of the River Thames just to the east of London. It has a population of approximately 145, 000, including the towns of Tilbury, Purfleet, Thurrock and Grays. Thurrock Council has its headquarters in Grays, housing approximately 1000 council employees.

Steve Liddiard, ICT client manager for Thurrock Council, was concerned about the increasing number of network reliability fault calls. This was a serious issue amongst staff using the most data intensive applications. Employees were having problems connecting on to the network, speeds were slow and the network would often stop responding. Where employees were connected to network points at the furthest distance from the hub, (90metres) there were constant problems. Steve knew that the only real option to improve reliability was to upgrade the network cabling to the latest standard – CAT6.