Leading Irish Insurer Safeguards its Efficiency Advantage with New 10-Gigabit Copper Cabling

VHI to have Ireland’s first SYSTIMAX® GigaSPEED® X10D
10 Gb/s copper cabling installation

VHI Healthcare is a $1 billion business with one of Ireland’s most recognized and respected brand names. It has more than 80 percent of the Irish private health insurance market and is also the country’s largest purchaser of healthcare services. The key to this success is the company’s industry leading efficiency, giving it a ratio of administration costs to premium income of just 8.3%. This is an advantage that VHI aims to keep in the years ahead by being first to adopt advanced new cabling technology.

IT systems are central to VHI’s efficiency, allowing it to offer customers exceptional value for money. Its advanced call centre and e-business unit, together with local offices, currently handle over 3.1 million customer contacts a year. Added to this, the company’s Internet health portal is visited 200,000 times a month.

VHI is not, however, resting on its laurels. It aims to raise productivity as its business grows by upgrading LANs at its Dublin headquarters with a new generation of network infrastructure. To handle the project, it chose Kedington, a SYSTIMAX® Business Partner and Ireland’s largest specialist structured cabling company.

Working with VHI’s IT department, Kedington designed a 10 Gb/s solution to replace a mix of older SYSTIMAX and other LAN cabling throughout the five-floor building. The new infrastructure includes Ireland’s first installation of SYSTIMAX GigaSPEED® X10D copper cabling. This can support 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections over distances up to 100 meters and fully meets all specifications in the latest Augmented Category 6 cabling standard.

The installation gives the value for money and backward compatibility that are a priority for VHI. It is being installed in five stages, one floor at a time, so compatibility with existing SYSTIMAX cabling helps the business operate normally while work is in progress.

The GigaSPEED X10D Solution also provides “future proofing” that protects cabling investment from being made obsolete by new systems demanding very high data speeds. Among the network intensive applications already planned for the Dublin office are Voice over IP, Closed Circuit Television and building access control.

VHI IT Manager, Pat Lyons, explained that the volume of data being transported across the network is growing exponentially: “We estimate the growth will continue to escalate as e-mail attachments grow ever larger, medical records become more comprehensive, and voice and video converge onto the LAN infrastructure. Taking the opportunity offered by the refurbishment of our headquarters meant we could plan for the future,” he said.

The new LAN infrastructure will help VHI provide its 1.55 million members, representing 40% of the Irish population, with better service and faster response. It will also support diversification and new products in fields that include travel and dental insurance.

Within the LANs, the GigaSPEED X10D copper cabling is complemented by 10 Gb/s SYSTIMAX LazrSPEED® multimode fiber connections in backbones and risers. These link the building’s central communications room on the lowest floor with intermediate distribution frames (IDFs) on each of the four higher floors.

From the IDFs, GigaSPEED X10D cabling connects nearly 1,000 information outlets in the building’s work areas. These cable runs are connected via the SYSTIMAX UMP (Universal Modular Panel) patching hardware in the IDFs and main communications room. The compact UMP system is an integral part of the GigaSPEED X10D Solution, helping ensure that 10 Gb/s end-to-end data transmission is supported even under adverse conditions.

To suit the structure of the building, Kedington routed cables to workplaces in a variety of ways. Some cables run under floors while others are in floor trunking, dado trunking and conduit drops. Although these connections currently support gigabit Ethernet connections, VHI will be able to migrate to the new 10GBASE-T data transmission standard without any changes to its LAN cabling.

Commenting on this first installation of GigaSPEED X10D cabling in Ireland, Wally Blennerhasset, Sales Director of SYSTIMAX Solutions in Ireland, said: “It makes sense for forward-looking organizations to prepare for the future by installing 10 gigabit connections to the desk now. The GigaSPEED X10D copper cabling solution lets them do this without the expense of fiber-to-the-desk and also offers the option of running power to networked devices over the same cabling. It’s tested to give 10 Gb/s performance from end-to-end over a full 100 meter, four-connector channel - even under adverse conditions. So users can advance to 10gigbit networking with confidence that their cabling won’t let them down.

“The new solution is also practical, easy to handle and well suited to organizations of all sizes. It lays the connectivity foundations for the highly productive systems that businesses will need to stay ahead of the competition in years to come,” he said.