Fast, resilient internet for NHS doctors, across two hospital sites
Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust needed to give doctors living in on-site accommodation fast, reliable internet across two hospital sites. Faced with expensive quotes to connect every room individually, the Trust's accommodation team came to us. We designed a resilient, centralised solution for each site, delivering high-speed, secure connectivity to more than 100 residences. It has proved reliable enough that the Trust now includes it in the accommodation as standard.
Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust operates from two main sites: Hull Royal Infirmary in the city centre and Castle Hill Hospital in Cottingham, around five miles away. Both provide on-site doctors' residences, managed by the Trust's estates and accommodation team, where doctors stay while working at the hospital. Wendy Dixon, the Trust's Accommodation Manager, approached us several years ago with a clear goal: fast, reliable internet for doctors right across the estate.
The challenge
The accommodation team had been quoted for connecting each room individually. Across more than 100 residences, that approach was extremely expensive, and it would still not have delivered the reliability or the central oversight the Trust needed.
- More than 100 doctors' residences needing fast, dependable internet
- Individual per-room connections that were prohibitively expensive
- Accommodation spread across multiple buildings on each site, not a single block
- Two hospital sites, five miles apart, to bring onto one coherent solution
- Sensitive work means the network had to be secure, with doctors unable to see one another's data
- At Castle Hill in particular, weak mobile coverage makes reliable Wi-Fi essential rather than a convenience
What we did
We designed one resilient solution per site, not a hundred separate connections. Instead of connecting every room individually, we put a centralised solution in at each site, one at Hull Royal Infirmary and one at Castle Hill, and distributed connectivity across the residences from there. This immediately changed the economics compared with the per-room quotes, and gave the Trust a single, manageable system at each site.
We built the infrastructure to span multiple buildings. The residences are not a simple block of rooms on one floor; they are spread across several buildings on each site. We delivered the building-to-building links and interconnectivity this required, including fibre runs and fibre ducting, so that every residence could be served from the central solution.
We engineered it for speed and resilience. Each site runs on a high-speed leased line, with a failover secondary line from a different provider, so a single provider outage cannot take the doctors offline. We monitor the connectivity live, and the system is designed to allocate bandwidth dynamically to whoever needs it at the time, rather than splitting it equally. That means a doctor doing time-critical research or study always has the capacity they need, when they need it.
We locked it down. Although the residences share a network, it is securely segmented so that no doctor can read another's files, enforced through managed switches, managed firewalls and access control lists. For people handling sensitive information, that separation is essential.
We have kept it current. The solution has been in place for several years, and we have continued to update it to keep it at standard, so the doctors' experience stays fast and reliable rather than degrading over time.
The results
Now included in the accommodation as standard, having originally been billed per room.
We came to PrimaryTech because connecting every room individually would have cost a fortune. What they delivered was better than we imagined: fast, reliable internet across both sites that our doctors can depend on. It has been so dependable that we no longer charge for it separately; it is simply part of the accommodation now. For sites like Castle Hill, where the mobile signal is poor, that reliability really matters.
Wendy Dixon - Accommodation Manager · Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS TrustFrequently asked questions.
What is a failover connection, and why does it matter?
A failover is a second, independent internet line that takes over automatically if the primary line fails. Because we use a different provider for the backup, a fault affecting one provider does not take the whole site offline, which is what keeps the service dependable for doctors who rely on it around the clock.
How is the network kept secure when residences share it?
The network is segmented so that each user is isolated from the others. Using managed switches, managed firewalls and access control lists, we ensure that no one on the shared connection can see another person's files or data, which is essential where sensitive information is involved.
Can connectivity like this scale across multiple buildings and sites?
Yes. In this case we linked multiple buildings on each of two hospital sites using fibre runs and ducting, then served every residence from a central solution per site. A centralised, well-designed approach scales far better, and more affordably, than connecting each room on its own.
Why not just rely on mobile data?
Mobile coverage is not dependable everywhere. At Castle Hill Hospital, for example, mobile signal is weak, so reliable high-speed Wi-Fi is essential rather than a nice-to-have for doctors living and studying on site.
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