Calibre One, Telstra scoop Cisco Meraki deal with NT Keno

Calibre One has landed a deal in partnership with Telstra and Cisco Meraki to build a new network to support Keno in the Northern Territory.

The NT Keno lottery network is operated by gaming and casino group Skycity Darwin and is played in more than 70 sites across the territory. While most of those sites are in metropolitan areas, some of them are in regional and very remote areas.

This brought about problems for Skycity, which used traditional MPLS network technology delivered over a mix of ADSL, NBN and satellite. Skycity's team lacked the flexibility to add additional services, relocate or establish temporary locations and struggled with visibility and control over the performance of its WAN.

Calibre One started work on a new solution two months ago along with Telstra and Cisco, which would allow any site to use whatever type of internet connection is available, including fixed, wireless or mobile.

A key pain point for Skycity was managing amount of routers, firewalls and firewall rulesets spread across the more than 70 sites. To alleviate the pressure, the company's decided to deploy a Cisco Meraki solution that provides full cloud management, configuration deployment and auto-VPN.

With the new solution, new hardware can be quickly deployed at remote sites and configured automatically by connecting to cloud services.

“SKYCITY is looking forward to building a relationship with Calibre One, Cisco and Telstra and have been impressed by their professionalism, knowledge and understanding of our business requirements," said NT Keno executive manager Natasha Harvey-Baron.

"NT Keno reaches the most remote areas in the territory, and we feel confident in the direction and technology Calibre One will be implementing.”

As part of the deal, Calibre One will be responsible for ongoing network support and future expansion and will work with Telstra, NBN and Skycity to deploy internet services and the Cisco Meraki solution. Calibre One told CRN that the solution is about half-finished.

“Calibre One is extremely excited to work with Skycity and the NT Keno network management team," Calibre One chief executive Steve Wemyss said.

"Cloud networking is rapidly becoming a significant force in the networking space as we transition from local infrastructure to cloud based services able to centrally manage widely dispersed networks. Calibre One enjoys a strong relationship with Cisco Meraki, a market leader in the space and we look forward to working on similar solutions in the future.”