GPON Fibre Networks for Retirement Living

The Strathearn Greenfield development is a master planned site offering aged care and retirement living to residents.  The development installed a GPON network as its base core infrastructure to provide residents with internet, voice, IP surveillance, access control, nurse call, free to air and Foxtel services over a unified fibre platform.

Watch Video:

Below is the transcript from the Strathearn Village video case study, filmed in August, 2014.

The video features:
Matthew Downey – CEO, Strathearn Village
Scott Lawton – Consultant, IT Integrity
Daneil Sullivan – Managing Director, Red Dog Group
Larry O’Toole – General Manager – Telco & Wireless, Madison Technologies.

MATTHEW DOWNEY:  The Strathearn Green Field development is a Master Plan site of some 8 hectare, or 20 acres, that is looking to provide a range of services to the local community, in particular Residential Aged Care/Retirement Living, but we are also looking at the provision of a childcare centre on site which will help it evolve to a truly inter-generational site. We feel having the right sort of infrastructure on the site to allow for the growth of a broad range of services is critical for the future of the site.  Having good connectivity to the outside world is certainly one aspect of that and something that we feel is very important.

SCOTT LAWTON:  We essentially worked with Strathearn to understand what it was that they were really trying to achieve from a business perspective and the key driver for them was the new Gundy Road project.  We did a general overview of what they were looking to achieve and through doing that we identified that they were going to need some base core infrastructure to provide all the services into the future for that new site, and when we evaluated all of the options, GPON was the obvious choice.

DANIEL SULLIVAN:  RDG is in essence a white label Telco provider for Strathearn Village, wholesaling internet, voice and an integrated billing platform.  Our vision for Red Dog Group is to be the leading telecommunications infrastructure provider within the aged care sector, delivering turn-key solutions to our client from backhaul, to the end user and everything in between.  The Corecess GPON platform is a carrier grade solution and that’s exactly what we knew we needed for our client.  Considering we were delivering telecommunications services to an entire aged care community, we knew we needed high reliability and high availability to deliver services to the entire development.  Using the Corecess GPON platform, we’re delivering a wide variety of IP services to residents including high speed internet, voice using NEC VOIP technology, IP surveillance using Sony and Milestone products, Access Control using Inner Range Integriti products, Nurse Call, Free-to-air and Foxtel all over a unified fibre platform.  Madison will definitely be our go-to vendor when it comes to future telecommunications projects.  Their pre-sales and post-sales support is invaluable. They sent down technicians from their Queensland branch to our Sydney office to do pre-rollout bench testing of all the associated IP services.  This was an invaluable aspect of the installation as it ensured a seamless rollout on site.  I now have several trained RDT technicians thanks to the support of Madison, and I feel more than comfortable sending them out to site, or remoting in to deal with support issues.

LARRY O’TOOLE:  This has been a very successful project.  What we’ve seen in the industry, we’ve been installing and providing services via GPON for about 8 years now and in the early days it was very slow and not terribly cost effective.  With the advent of NBN Co, they’ve made fibre a normal means of receiving telecommunications services and what Red Dog has done with Strathearn is that they’ve pushed that envelope even further and they are providing high speed retail services over this network, much like NBN does but, in locations where NBN is not able to serve people yet.

MATTHEW DOWNEY: Red Dog Group have been invaluable in providing a solution for us in rolling out the fibre optic network here and have certainly been great to work with and very willing to come forward with ideas and suggestions on how best to provide a solution for us.  We don’t have a significant IT resource ourselves so obviously we do rely on the expertise of others to provide that solution.  I think from a resident’s perspective, one of the great benefits is going to be having that stable connectivity to the outside world and being able to engage on a social level, through be it a Skype or teleconferencing type solution.  Being able to talk to their kids or their grandkids who might be on the other side of the world, for example, and being able to do that with great connectivity is something that I think will certainly add value.  The infrastructure that we’re putting in place here will certainly allow us to capture and build upon emerging technologies to enable us to deliver healthcare benefits to our residents in care, whether they are in the retirement living environment or within the aged care setting, and having the right sort of infrastructure in place allows us to build upon that.

SCOTT LAWTON:  I actually think that there is a lot of opportunity with GPON and with retirement and aged care providers implementing GPON.  These days we try to work with our customers so that they can see that technology is more of an investment than it is a cost and by implementing technology such as GPON they’re able to provide services to their clients and they’re able to generate revenue off those services over that platform and that is essentially the reason why we went for GPON with Strathearn, it was so that they were also able to generate revenue from that investment and create a self-sustaining technology investment rather than that just being another part of the expense of the project.  There’s certainly an opportunity for other aged care providers to do exactly the same thing and I think that today, aged care has really changed significantly from the traditional residential aged care. A lot of organisations now are implementing retirement villages because of the funding changes that have taken place with the government and so their whole business model is changing and they’re constrained from a funding point of view.  Utilising technology to generate revenue to provide better services is the only way really that they can look to gain a competitive advantage and that is definitely the way of the future.