ABOVE the streets of Alnwick in Northumberland, a small wireless network is passing information from council operations back and forth.

The town was the first in the county to benefit from the “wireless mesh” set up by County Durham company KBR around two years ago, and is now one of 18 towns and villages using a system that links council buildings and allows council employees to access the network on the move.

Northumberland County Council sent out a tender in late 2007 to obtain a resilient and cost-effective wireless network to connect to North-Net, an open network which provides a backbone fibre connection from Morpeth to Newcastle.

KBR won the tender after demonstrating an approach which is being used in Munich and which was devised by US wireless company SkyPilot.

KBR then started work on a similar system in Alnwick and Berwick before extending its work further across the county.

The technology works by fitting antennae on council buildings such as schools, fire stations, libraries and tourist information offices which communicate with each other to create a “mesh” over the town.

If an antennae fails, there are enough alternatives to complete the mesh without losing service.

This system allows for communication between council buildings and access on the move, and updates to allow home workers to connect are expected to be deployed this month.

By mounting their antennae on the houses of home workers, KBR says councils could save £750,000 over the next five years compared to the BT equivalent.

KBR’s technical director Gareth Tomlin said: “This is for wireless connectivity from building to building, and there’s also a wireless cloud beneath the wireless nodes.

“It’s a privately-owned network, which council employees can access via PDAs, smartphones and laptops, even if they’re down by the river, get a live feed into the network and work accordingly. Productivity has increased as a result.” KBR can typically cover a 7km radius around each town they serve, and the signal is not disrupted by obstacles such as hills and buildings.

“Deployment in Allendale will soon be completed, and the service is already in place in locations such as Ashington, Blyth, Berwick, Haltwhistle, Hexham, Morpeth, Ponteland, Prudhoe, Seahouses and Cramlington. KBR also carried out the installation of the internal wireless systems, and offers 24/7 support for the system.

Tomlin said: “We’re just starting to deploy the equipment in North Tyneside.

“We’re starting to get to the stage where neighbouring councils can share services and swap over to each other’s networks if there’s a failure.

“There’s also the opportunity for additional revenue. Smart meter readers are projected to be in every home by 2020, and utilities companies could go to the council and buy a portion of the network to enable them to deploy these smart meter readers.

“The 3G network is also getting overloaded so they could set up a situation where the mobiles upload the data to this network and use the 3G network where this network is not available.

“We’d like to let as many councils in the country know that this opportunity exists. They don’t need to be scared as to whether it works or not, as it’s tried and tested.

“Plus it will save them a lot of money. We have support staff all over the country now, through one of our partners, who can do the first-line troubleshooting before we deploy trained staff to do any hardware swapouts that are needed.”

The company currently has 21 staff and a turnover of £2.7m. It credits its move into this area for keeping it ticking along, as opposed to continuing solely as a cabling and audio visual firm.

Tomlin said: “We’ve pretty much become a wireless company. It hasn’t greatly increased our turnover, but considering the cabling and audio visual sector has been a difficult place recently, it has allowed us to continue with the same turnover and increase our maintenance revenue. “There are other wireless and mesh products out there but they either haven’t got the bandwidth or the range of functionality. We’re yet to find one better than the one we deploy.”