LEBANON, Pa., Sept. 13, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Comcast Business
today announced that Lebanon
County, the 16th most populated metropolitan area
in the State of Pennsylvania, is
using Ethernet services to connect six municipal sites across the
region. In addition to linking all locations back to the County
Court House for better internal collaboration and data warehousing,
this robust Ethernet network is serving a key role as the
infrastructure behind the County's 911 emergency response service,
which impacts more than 133,000 residents.
Located approximately 25 miles east of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Lebanon County is
comprised of 26 municipalities and seven boroughs. With 37 in-house
departments and seven satellite offices through the region, the
County needed a way to connect its geographically dispersed
locations to its Municipal Building for records management
purposes. For the County's Emergency Management Agency (EMA), the
need was even more critical, as its police officers, firefighters
and other emergency responders depended on reliable service to
transmit and receive notifications for its 911 telephone emergency
system in real-time.
"The County provides real-time public safety data to hundreds of
emergency responders, including law enforcement, fire departments
and emergency medical services. This generates a considerable
amount of continuous traffic traversing our networks. Performance
and reliability of our Internet connection can have a direct impact
on the safety of both the first responders and the residents we
serve. After experiencing several outages that impacted our ability
to reliably provide these services, we knew we had to make a
change," said Bob Dowd, IT manager
for the Lebanon County Emergency
Management Agency. "The local team at Comcast Business went out of
its way to meet our specialized needs – and even laid thousands of
feet of brand new fiber – to give us a diverse path from the
County's existing Comcast connection and ensure that our emergency
responders can do their job without worrying about an unreliable
network connection holding things up."
Comcast Business installed a six-site Ethernet Network Service
with network capacity of up to 50 Megabits-per-second (Mbps) that
connects five County offices – the Area Agency on Aging, the Adult
Probation Office, Mental Health and Intellectual Disabilities
Office, Community Action Partnership and Correctional Facility –
back to the Court House. The Court House separately has an
additional 50 Mbps Ethernet Dedicated Internet connection that
supports the County's internal records management system and all
online traffic for these six locations, while the Emergency
Management Agency has an additional 100 Mbps Ethernet Dedicated
Internet line.
"Comcast Business is able to give us an advanced technology
infrastructure for the same price as what we were paying before,
which is allowing our 650-person staff to access the shared drives
and government systems they need for our daily business
operations," said Danielle M. Hogg,
director of IT services for Lebanon
County. "We are now able to collaborate with other offices
as though we all worked in the same building, which, by extension,
also helps us provide better services to the residents we
serve."
Lebanon County is also
exploring the possibility of using Ethernet for additional disaster
recovery purposes. By taking advantage of its existing
infrastructure, the County will have the option to reroute all of
its data traffic to another location in the event of a power outage
at its main offices.
"Municipalities are engaged in a constant struggle to deliver
key services to their staff and residents while still being
cognizant of costs – but an increasing number are finding that
partnering with a service provider that already has the technology
infrastructure in place can help them do this quickly and
cost-effectively," said Paul
Merritt, vice president of Comcast Business in the Keystone
Region. "Comcast has invested decades of research and engineering
into building infrastructure to make its advanced network broadly
available to meet the performance and capacity needs of business,
education and municipal customers around the country, and we are
looking forward to continuing to offer new and innovative services
to local governments of all sizes."
About Comcast Business:
Comcast Business offers Ethernet,
Internet, Wi-Fi, Voice, TV and Managed Enterprise Solutions to help
organizations of all sizes transform their business. Powered by a
next-generation, fiber-based network, and backed by 24/7 technical
support, Comcast Business is one of the largest contributors to the
growth of Comcast Cable. Comcast Business is the nation's largest
cable provider to small and mid-size businesses and has emerged as
a force in the Enterprise market; recognized over the last two
years by leading industry associations as one of the fastest
growing provider of Ethernet services.
For more information, call 866-429-3085. Follow on Twitter
@ComcastBusiness and on other social media networks
at http://business.comcast.com/social.
About Comcast Cable:
Comcast Cable is one of the
nation's largest video, high-speed Internet and phone provider to
residential customers under the XFINITY brand and also provides
these services to businesses. Comcast has invested in
technology to build an advanced network that delivers among the
fastest broadband speeds, and brings customers personalized video,
communications and home management offerings. Comcast
Corporation (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) is a global media and technology
company. Visit www.comcastcorporation.com for more
information.
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SOURCE Comcast Cable