4 min read
A residential care group operating 12 care homes across the East Midlands and Yorkshire. The homes were connected through managed WAN links provided by a legacy network supplier whose contract had gone unchallenged for over five years. What had once been a reasonable setup had become an expensive bottleneck that was holding back care delivery.
Service: Technology Consulting Sector: Residential care
The managed WAN was costing over £5,400 per month across 12 homes. Bandwidth was capped at 50Mbps at most sites, with some homes still running on 20Mbps connections that had not been upgraded since they were first installed.
Electronic care records, video calls with residents' families, online staff training platforms, and care management software were all competing for limited bandwidth. Managers reported that the electronic medication administration system would slow to a crawl during shift handovers when multiple tablets tried to sync simultaneously. Video calls with families - increasingly important for residents with limited mobility - frequently dropped or froze. Online training modules that care workers needed to complete for mandatory compliance would buffer endlessly during busy periods.
All inter-site traffic routed through a central hub, creating bottlenecks when homes needed to share information. Wi-Fi coverage in the homes was inconsistent, with dead spots in lounges, corridors, and garden areas where care workers needed connectivity most. Staff had learned to work around the problems rather than report them, which masked how much the infrastructure was holding back the quality of care.
The existing network provider had never proposed alternatives, never reviewed whether the managed WAN still represented good value, and never suggested that the bandwidth might need increasing as care technology demands grew.
We designed a phased migration from the managed WAN to a modern SD-WAN architecture built on Ubiquiti equipment, starting with a proof of concept at one care home.
The pilot home received a full-fibre broadband connection installed alongside the existing managed WAN link. Both ran in parallel for two weeks while we validated performance, tested failover, and confirmed that every care system - electronic care records, medication administration, nurse call integration, CCTV - worked reliably on the new infrastructure. Only when the pilot was proven stable did we proceed to the wider rollout.
Each home received a Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machine Pro, new switches, and wireless access points positioned for complete coverage - including corridors, lounges, dining rooms, and outdoor areas used by residents. Full-fibre broadband delivering up to 500Mbps replaced the legacy WAN connections. Secure IPsec tunnels connected all sites through SD-WAN with intelligent routing.
VLANs separated care systems, staff devices, resident Wi-Fi, CCTV, and nurse call systems onto isolated networks - essential for protecting sensitive care data while still allowing residents and families guest Wi-Fi access. Each deployment was preconfigured off-site, shipped to the home, installed alongside existing infrastructure, tested thoroughly, then cut over with a documented rollback plan.
Every installation was designed to cause zero disruption to care delivery. Equipment was installed during quieter periods, and existing connections were left running until the new infrastructure was fully validated.
The monthly network cost dropped from over £5,400 to under £1,620 - a 70% reduction, saving over £45,000 per year. That money is now available for care delivery rather than legacy network contracts.
Bandwidth increased from 50Mbps to 500Mbps at every home. Electronic care records load instantly. Video calls with families are reliable. Online training modules no longer buffer during busy periods. The medication administration system works smoothly even during shift handovers when a dozen tablets are syncing at once.
Wi-Fi coverage now reaches every room, corridor, and communal area in every home. Care workers can access records and complete documentation wherever they are, rather than returning to a nurse station to find a signal.
Every home is on the same Ubiquiti platform, monitored and managed through a single dashboard. Network health, device status, and bandwidth usage are visible in real time across the entire group. When something needs changing, it can be done remotely in minutes.
70% network cost reduction across 12 care homes · Over £45,000/year saved · Full-fibre broadband at every home (up from 50Mbps) · SD-WAN replacing legacy managed WAN · Standardised Ubiquiti platform · Wi-Fi coverage in every room, corridor, and communal area
Related service: Technology Consulting