Networking Care Homes Best Practice

Transcription

1 Networking Care Homes Best Practice Choosing internet for your care home Having been involved in implementing IT systems for care providers for over 20 years, we are reasonably clear on what the requirements are for successful IT systems in care homes of pretty much any size. This best practice guide can be used for organisation of one care home, or many care homes; and with a few IT users or many IT users. Whilst it was acceptable in the past for a care home to have a self-contained network infrastructure, the only feasible option in the modern world is to be connected to the internet. The internet is a source of vast amounts of information relevant to care provides, as well as increasingly being a core component in business applications such as banking, accounts and care planning, so the place this guide will start is connecting to the internet. There are a great many internet service providers to choose from, and nearly all of them have a monthly charge, some with a set-up charge, some with free set-up. There are many names for the internet connection sometimes it is called Broadband, sometimes ADSL, sometimes Cable, sometimes Fibre but there are really three types of internet connection which are as follows: Copper wire all the way from the main telephone exchange to the care home Fibre optic cable from the main telephone exchange to the roadside cabinet, and then copper wire from the roadside cabinet to the care home Fibre optic cable from the main telephone exchange to the care home The simple rule of thumb is that the more fibre optic cable and the less copper wire the better. As an example, BT Infinity is normally fibre to the cabinet and copper to the care home, and this provides a good general purpose performance for everything but the most demanding care home. There an increasing number of fibre to the care home providers, but, as this requires a fibre option cable to be laid, it has a slower uptake. Also, whilst fibre is technically faster than copper, the internet providers don t always enable access to the maximum speeds, and the lower cost internet providers can provide other restrictions so a quick look at how internet providers operate: Apologies for getting a bit technical, and I will keep this as simple as possible. The following diagram shows the basic details of an internet connection: 1

2 The internet cloud is a depiction of the millions of potentially useful sources of information on the internet, and the house indicates a care home and in between is the internet service provider. If you have a fast connection to the internet service provider, but they have a slow connection to the internet cloud, then your connection to the internet will be slow. Internet providers advertise the speed only from the care home to themselves and don t tend to give any information about how fast they can access the internet. There is another aspect of the speed internet service providers give which can be misleading, and this is that just about every internet connection has two speeds, one for information coming from the internet provider to the care home, and another for the information going from the care home to the internet providers. These are called respectively download speed and upload speed. Generally, more information is downloaded than is uploaded, but a slow upload speed will detrimentally impact a fast download speed, so both are important. Finally, some lower cost internet packages will limit the amount of information that can be sent from the internet this should always be avoided because it risks not being able to use the internet once the limit has been reached. There is loads of information about internet service providers, and they all offer multiple price deals which change all the time it can be a minefield, but as this is a best practice guide we will place a stake in the ground about a few sensible options. All of these are Fibre optic to the roadside cabinet as a minimum. 1. BT infinity used to be less reliable, but tends to be pretty good now. It is important to go for their unlimited option, and whilst it is a little more expensive, the business connection is the one to use. This should provide speeds of 38Mb/s download and 19Mb/s upload which are good benchmark speeds for a reasonable level of usage, twice the download speed is also available. 2. PlusNet are very similar to BT infinity and provide the same kind of speeds for download and upload, and are often slightly less expensive than BT infinity. Their unlimited business option is the one to go for. 3. Sky provide very similar speeds to BT Infinity again the unlimited option is the one to go for, and it should be the Pro variant. 4. The absolute best for reliability is Zen Internet, but they can be more expensive and have been late to the Fibre game. 5. Virgin media offer some financially attractive packages, they work well where speed is more important than reliability, our experience is that they are not reliable enough for a business class internet connection. Getting the best WiFi access Enough about getting to the internet a key purpose of this guide is to distribute the information across a care home, and this is where the real challenge begins. Most care homes are larger than the typical domestic house, and therefore the equipment most internet service providers install is unsuitable. Whilst there may be some desktop computers in an office, which would typically be connected with network cables to a network switch, the modern way to communicated is with tablets and handheld devices. The key issue here is WiFi, which is the most flexible and versatile way to connect mobile 2

3 devices to each other and to the internet. WiFi works well through air, but not so well through walls and ceilings, particularly if the walls are quite thick or have reflective insulation. As a general rule of thumb, WiFi will go through two domestic thickness walls, provided the angle the WiFi has to travel is not less than 30 degrees. This diagram might help: In the first case the link to the WiFi goes through two walls, but at close to 90 degrees, and this will provide a stronger signal than if it has to go through one wall at an acute angle. This diagram is quite simplistic because walls have different construction and thickness but the critical point is that it is not distance from the WiFi hub that matters as much as the quantity of solid material the signal needs to traverse through. To overcome the limitations of WiFi it is necessary to have multiple WiFi hubs (often known as access points) and these to be laid out across the home. It is possibly for one WiFi hub to act as a repeater for another WiFi hub, but importantly, the amount of information that can be communicated from one WiFi hub to another is halved for each repeater, so a string of five would lead to about 5% of the communication capability available at the end WiFi hub. Unless the care home is small then using WiFi repeaters will not lead to a good solution, which is unfortunate because the only option remaining is to have network cable to join the WiFi hubs together using a central switch as per this diagram, which is trying to depict a reasonably large home with six WiFi hubs. 3

4 There are some options to lay network signals over electrical wires, but this is again designed for domestic use. If a care home has three phase electrics then each phase will be independent of each other. Time and again we have found laying a few lengths of network cable to be the solution to solving network connectivity problems, and the cost of maintaining an installation that avoids network cable makes any other option unfeasible. Six WiFi hubs would be sufficient for a home of about 60 to 100 beds, but construction and layout are critically important, and the only guaranteed way to establish how many WiFi hubs are needed is to do a physical survey. However, just having multiple WiFi hubs wired to a central switch can still be a problem for people moving around the home because once they are connected to one WiFi hub then the connection will be lost when they get out of range of that hub, before it is reconnected to the next hub. The solution to this is to have each WiFi hub part of a total system, so that the system can negotiate which hub is best for each device all the time. There are lots of differences between the various makes of WiFi units and to achieve the best performance it is necessary to have dual frequency, and to be connected as a single WiFi infrastructure. To give maximum range we suggest ac as this is more capable than n, yet still supports older devices. Our experience has shown that Aruba Networks provide the most cost effective solution that works across large locations with diverse devices. Cisco and NetGear also provide WiFi hubs that can be connected together and are known to work, but our experience is that Aruba is more reliable and give better performance. One of the major advantages of a network like Aruba is the ability to have multiple users accounts which are propagated across the entire network. It is possible to have separate user accounts for visitors, residents, carers, and senior staff so that different user accounts give different levels of access to the internet or to local network resources, but all user accounts are available everywhere there is a WiFi signal. An example of how this could work is that when carers logs into the WiFi infrastructure their account blocks social media websites, but when a visitor or resident logs in then their account allows social media websites. How to avoid network blackouts One thing that needs to be thought about when designing a network is disaster recovery, which is most likely come about as a result of the internet connection being unavailable for a period of time. The most common cause for unavailability is workmen accidentally breaking cables when digging the road, although trees falling down and vehicles running into telephone poles all have been known to cause problems. If the internet is not working for a few hours then this is rarely a serious problem, but when it becomes days then life can get harder. A relatively low cost option to provide some level of internet access at these times is a standard smartphone, as nearly all of these can have tethering turned on to provide access for up to ten wireless devices. Beware of the costs for data when using a smart phone to carry data from tethered devices, some providers are very limited in the amount of data that is included in the standard package. The only problem in this case might be the desk top computers that only connect with network wires as they can t connect to a tethered smart phone. There is a solution to this, which is to 4

5 have a router that supports 3g/4g as part of the network hub. Whether it is necessary to consider this kind of unit will depend on the need for internet access at all times, and the cost of the devices and the data communication. 5