Thus drives new network at car dealership

19th May 2008
By Stephen Evans

Almost a million Britons are set to take out a second-hand car loan in the next six months, but could be paying too much.

New figures from Sainsbury's Bank show 5.5 million UK residents are planning to buy a second-hand car in the coming months, with one in six (931,600 people) taking out a car loan to fund their purchase.

However, while almost a million people are planning on taking out a car loan, they are planning to pay less for their new motor.

Network services provider Thus has announced that it will be installing a fully meshed Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) Wide Area Network (WAN) at Swansway Motor Group, a car dealership in the North West of England.

The new network will be used to connect five showrooms across the region and enable employees to access centralised and real-time information about car retail and servicing. It will be used to run the company's Dealer Management System as well as provide internet access, file sharing and backup. In the event of a data loss, data can be transferred from the company's headquarters while the system remains operational.

Eison, an advisor on telecoms networks for enterprises, will be working with Thus to deliver the new system.

The new network will enable Swansway's showrooms to be connected by speeds of between 2 Mbps and 4 Mbps. Workers at the dealerships will have access to stock, finance, servicing and parts, customer records and planning. The company hopes this will result in an improvement in operational efficiency and customer service.

At the request of Swansway, the network has scalability and disaster recovery functionality to enable the company to remain operational and maintain network access across other sites in case of a problem with the network.

source :

http://www.cbronline.com