Jean Demange

"We have been using this solution for the past four months, and are all very impressed with its performance. We rely on its performance, and also the speed and security of the solution, and in effect, stake our lives on it each day in the field."

Technical Director

SDIS90 Belfort

At a Glance

Organization:

SDIS90 Belfort is one of 100 fire brigades located throughout France

Location:

Belfort Territory, France Various remote locations

Situation:

Emergency communica- tions network required a scalable, flexible, and high- performing router solution

Solution Used:

5840 Multiport Router

Main Benefits:

•Scalability to handle network growth

•Enhanced network reliability and performance through load sharing and load balancing

•Decreased total cost of ownership

SDIS90 Belfort - French Fire Brigade

Quick Eagle Networks Case Study / 5840 Multiport Router

Fire Brigade Ensures Secure and Reliable Intra-Team Emergency Communications by Leveraging Multilink and IP Routing

The Service Départemental d'Incendie et de Secours Belfort, or SDIS90 Belfort, is one of 100 fire brigades throughout France, and is responsible for protecting the Belfort area's citizens and businesses from every type of fire danger. Belfort is a highly industrialized area, widely known as a magnet for major metal-works and electronics-related manufacturing, drawing companies such as Peugeot-Citroën and General Electric. To ensure secure and reliable communication, in the face of life-threatening situations, SDIS90 Belfort’s information technology department was looking for a highly scalable, flexible networking solution to interconnect their central command center and three remote locations around the territory.

Mission Critical Communications Demand Higher Flexibility

SDIS90 Belfort’s geographically distributed firefighting teams needed a high-performance, secure communications infrastructure to connect their central command site to three remote locations. Colonel Jean Demange, technical director of the Belfort Territory fire brigade, contacted systems integrator Black Box France for their advice and expertise to provide a practical solution that met the need for security, future growth, and high performance.

After discussing the unique deployment requirements with Black Box France, it was determined that three high-speed 6xE1connections between the four locations would be the best solution. However, with SDIS90 Belfort’s highly sensitive transmissions in mind, it became apparent that the wide area networks (WAN) equipment required to connect all locations would have to be highly scalable, reliable, and sustain the highest security standards.

"In assessing the needs of the fire brigade in Belfort, we quickly understood that we required a solution that combined a high amount of flexibility with bandwidth scalability," said Jean-Luc La Paglia, sales director Black Box France. “Furthermore, we were looking for a solution that would allow our customer’s four sites to easily collaborate and share information and, at the same time ensure ease of configuration, management and security."

Solution: Integrated Multilink, Routing and IP Probe Functions

Quick Eagle Networks, a provider of intelligent WAN access solutions, was called upon by Black Box France to provide a solution that could ensure reliable and secure transmissions between the four sites in a highly efficient manner.