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.”
