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Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) is a mandatory, carbon-trading scheme developed by DEFRA (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs). We can help you understand your responsibilities and implications of how the CRC impacts your business. We will guide you through the registration process, helping you to reduce your carbon emissions, as well as your costs. Contact us now
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"Thanks for your time and help yesterday. Who could believe that such a small change would make such a big difference. You are now everyone's best friend here!"
Roger Menzies, Powerplate
"Philip, I knew from our first meeting (we did get on so well) that Astro would be a company that would work well with Darley..."
"...It has been good to work with such a dedicated team of people rather than a faceless company and I hope Astro Communications and Darley have many years of working together like this."
John Nethersole, Darley
"Can you please pass on my congratulations and thanks to all those Astro guys involved in getting Haven Europe working..."
"...this was seamless with everyone from the Have Europe Directors themselves, members of the Europe team, project team members from outside and of us in the IS Dept being yet again delighted by an excellent job well done."
Jeremy Stancombe, Bourne Leisure
"...and in particular I'd like to thank the Astro team for the rapid resolution of the chamber data issues last Tuesday. It's very reassuring to have that kind of support."
Ian Short, London Borough of Waltham Forest
"Far too often these days, people complain but do not pass on praise. We have had an absolutely fantastic day today with Rob, under the most difficult of circumstances. He has gotten to grips with our network very quickly, and we have made some significant modifications..."
"...I am absolutely delighted with the progress that we have made with him. Well done Astro on a great days work!"
Richard Roebuck, Edwards Duthie
...Manchester went very well - thanks to you and your team for a sterling job"
Martyn Paddon, MT Associates
"...everything has worked out very well. Thanks for doing a difficult job and for your foresight beyond the initial requirements..."
Padraig Coogan, Royal College of Arts
"Just wanted to say a quick thanks to everyone for the help we got rolling out the new PCs on our caravan parks, all the guys have been brilliant (as usual)..."
David Newton, Bourne Leisure
"I would like to formally our appreciation and gratitude for the assistance you gave us at Maidstone, both in connection with your own responsibilities and for the genuine added value you provided us in helping us with our telecoms issues..."
"...if it had not been for you we would not have managed to get our shop open on time."
Kevin Johnson, Deep Blue Restaurants Ltd
"I have used Astro for a number of years now because I have found their work to be of the highest quality. Their experience, depth of knowledge and customer care are big factors in their favour"
David Taylor, Bedford County Council
"...I am over the moon with the information you have sent me, It's plain and straight forward, I could never have produced anything as professional...
...by the way I think your prices are fair."
Steve Cuthy, Visualcom
"We know that when we hand over a project to Astro, they will take care of the whole job efficiently and to a very high standard. Reliability and trustworthiness are their hallmarks"
Eddy Best, London Borough of Waltham Forest
"Once more, many thanks for your time, effort and input over these last few months, you've been a godsend to us."
Neil Cheetham, Valuation Office (VOA)
"Our videoconferencing solution means we can now hold our meetings much more efficiently and with Astro Communications the support we get is phenomenal!"
Phil Bridges, Ordnance Survey
"...by the way I am told your guys did a splendid job on board the St Catherine yesterday."
Roger Sandford, Wightlink Ferries
"I would like to mention how impressed I was by the staff who installed the equipment. My Caretaker was over the moon that not only did they ensure they worked when pupils would not interfere, but were adamant they cleared up any mess they made themselves."
T P O'Leary Quinn, Burwood School
"...such a smooth switch over can only be put down to excellent work carried out by the Astro staff..."
John Nethersole, Darley
"Just to let you know I have been really impressed by your guys."
Steve Smith, Royal Institute of British Architects
"Thanks for expediting our work so quickly. I was very impressed by your staff."
Ian Budgen, Tiffin School
"We were very impressed with your engineer's professional approach and would like to thank him for all his help..."
Simon Leaver, Cavendish School
"Thanks so much for the excellent work that Astro did for the RCA 2007 Graduate Show. The whole thing works beautifully and is very discreet with no complaints from users..."
Jonathan Warner, Royal College of Arts
"Getting Astro in to look at my network was the best career decision I ever made!"
Jay Moyes, Brett Construction
"Astro has always completed their tasks, on time, within the budgeted price and without any ongoing operational problems. Even when given short notice of a requirement..."
"...the company has always presented itself in a professional manner and the different engineers that have worked on our sites have all shown a high level of expertise and commitment."
Anthony Russell, Hiscox
"Just a quick note to say yet again an outstanding performance your guys give when they are on site. We cracked through many things yesterday, not only resolving the main issue but also understanding the initial cause. Raj was a credit to Astro as always."
Richard Roebuck, Edwards Duthie
"Astro Communications has been a preferred supplier of voice and data cabling to Close Premium Finance for two and a half years. In that time they have supplied and installed cable to some 16,000 square feet of offices and supplied the cable links between individual floors. The quality and reliability of their supply and installation has never been in question, and we continue to use them for all our cabling needs"
Patrick Norman, Close Premium Finance
"Thank you once again for the works undertaken on site. I understand the client is extremely happy with the works completed and as main contractor I have found it a pleasure to work along side a team as efficient as your own. Please extend my thanks across to Graham and the team"
Kevin Coleman, Swift Construction
"Astro Communications and Glebe School work as a true partnership. Not only do they supply, install and support our LAN infrastructure with minimum disruption, they also take the time to assist in our fund raising activities for the students. Their engineers are always courteous and respectful of our needs"
Conor Ferris, Glebe School
"When a supplied fibre was found to be faulty, it created a nightmare scenario for our timescales. But Astro took control, told us it wasn't our problem and fixed it with the minimum of fuss and without any impact to the project at all."
Tony Floyde, IPC Media
IT Directors Forum Services & Products
We have noticed in the past that our interpretation of the meaning of one of the Services & Products selection may not be the same as your interpretation. So, in an attempt to reduce the risk of us wasting your time and to assist you with your selection we have elaborated on our choices in the IT Directors Forum Guide.
FREE CARBON REDUCTION COMMITMENT AUDIT
Business Continuity & Resilience
Although we did not select any areas in this field our voice, data and video infrastructure solutions can be designed to support your Business Continuity strategy.
Business / IT Management
Relocation
We have assisted many of our clients through successful relocation projects over the past 25 years. We take care of all of your voice, data and video infrastructure requirements for your relocation to prepare before you occupy the new building or area, we plan and relocate ICT equipment and we manage third party service providers and equipment suppliers. We can provide a total service or we can provide additional resource to your existing team. See Project Management for more information.
IT Configuration & Change Management
Some of our clients have had to go through considerable culture changes recently to comply with PCI DSS requirements or the Government Code of Connection (Co Co). We supply flexible and effective services and solutions to drastically reduce the labour intensive areas of IT Configuration and Change Management. See NSI Assist for more information.
IT Compliance Management
Compliance has been high on the list of requirements for our clients. We provide a full audit service followed by provision of a strategy to achieve compliance. We assist our clients in all areas of infrastructure compliance including:
- Logging
- Auditing
- Penetration Testing
- Configuration Management (switches, routers, firewalls, gateways, servers, PCs)
- Change Management
- Secure Access
Capacity Planning
We specialise in LAN, WAN, VPN and Wireless capacity planning and optimisation. We have extensive experience in squeezing every last bit out your network infrastructure, either through effective configuration of existing equipment and services, working with application developers to fine tune applications to be more ‘network friendly’ or through WAN and Remote Access optimisation appliances. For more information see:
ITIL
Our automated proactive help desk – NSI Assist – can significantly reduce your overheads in managing, retaining and monitoring documentation and Service Level Agreements. See NSI Assist.
Communications
This is along with infrastructure/networking is our core business speciality.
Voice Solutions
As a direct result of many successful deployments and very happy clients our flagship voice solution is ShoreTel. ShoreTel Unified Communications solutions have the lowest Total Cost of Ownership with many benefits included in the basic solution without the need for additional licence fees. ShoreTel solutions are resilient, extremely flexible and very easy to deploy and support. We have the largest and most experienced ShoreTel qualified engineering team in the UK. Our combined sales and engineering teams were recently accredited by ShoreTel as a ‘World Class Support Team’ achieving an average of over 95% in ShoreTel’s independently run customer satisfaction survey. In addition to ShoreTel, we have in house Siemens and Aastra trained engineers and can offer seamless multi-vendor support on a wide range of vendor’s solutions (including Nortel), our clients find this service particularly useful when migrating to new solutions. For more information see:
Add section on migration and ShoreTel VPN in the ShoreTel and Telephony sectionsData Solutions
We employ some of the most experienced data network engineers in the UK and possibly Europe. Our engineers have extensive experience of a vast range of public and private networks having experienced the development of modern data communications from their beginning. Some of our engineers have nearly 40 years experience in their field and our network team have an unbeaten record troubleshooting network infrastructure problems. For more information see:
- Troubleshooting
- Network Infrastructure
- Meru Networks
- Wireless LAN
- Wireless Inter-Building
- BlueCat DHCP/DNS/IPAM
Contact Centres
ShoreTel provides a very flexible Contact Centre solution with many features ‘out of the box’. When ShoreTel Unified Communications solutions are combined with CommSoft Communications Management Software and Voice Recording Solutions you get a highly resilient, very flexible and cost effective Contact Centre solution that can significantly reduce the Total Cost of Ownership of your Contact Centre. Agents can also work from home or from satellite offices transparently with full central facilities. For more information click on the links below:
Roaming & Remote Working
Due to the nature of their work, most of our sales team and engineers are remote workers from home, hotels or on the road. We also have members of our team based in France and Australia. We take full advantage of ShoreTel’s Unified Communications feature rich solution maintain effective communication across the UK and the World. For more information click on the links below:
IP Telephony
For more information click on the links below:
Audio / Video / Web Conferencing
We have supplied and supported videoconferencing solutions for many years. As soon as we saw the LifeSize High Definition Videoconferencing solution we realised what other vendors were striving for. When you participate in a videoconference session via a LifeSize solution it really is just like being there. ShoreTel provide audio conferencing solutions. For more information click on the links below:
Mobility Solutions
Our mobility solutions are based on ShoreTel for voice and Unified Communications and Riverbed for remote access acceleration providing near LAN performance via a mobile VPN connection. For more information see:
Unified Messaging
For information see:
CTI
For information see:
Unified Communications
For information see:
Convergence
For information see:
Customer Interface / CRM
Call Centre Software
For information see:
Call Logging
See CommSoft.
Data Centres
Virtualisation & Automation
We have two Certified Data Centre Designers (CDCD) in our team. We provide design, consultancy and installation services within data centres. Our engineers have years of experience working in live data centre environments. For more information see:
Consolidation
For more information see:
Design & Build
We are qualified to design data centres and can work with our partners to provide a full design and build service. For more information see:
Performance
Our network engineers can analyse and advise on data centre performance. Our CDCDs can advise on environmental issues to improve overall performance and efficiency.
Power Management & Cooling
Our CDCDs can advise on power management and cooling issues and efficiency. For more information see:
Infrastructure / Networking
With communications this is our core speciality.
Cabling
Our Projects Team are BICSI (Building Industry Consultancy Services International) qualified and have many years experience delivering and project managing structured cabling solutions. We currently support many sites some the size of small towns supplying and supporting all of the internal and external copper and optical fibre cabling infrastructure. For more information see Network Infrastructure.
Convergence
For information see:
Helpdesk / Support Services
We are launching what we believe to be the World’s first automated proactive help desk solution at the IT Directors Forum this year. Many years of engineering experience has gone into the development of NSI Assist. NSI Assist constantly gathers information on your infrastructure and establishes a baseline. In the event of a problem NSI Assist will analyse logs and traps and carry out a series of tests automatically to determine the cause of the problem. It will also attempt to resolve the problem and/or issue a fault ticket to the relevant vendor. NSI Assist will then monitor SLAs until the problem is resolved. NSI Assist will remember the resolution to improve performance in the event of a similar problem in the future. NSI Assist can automate routine maintenance procedures such as: network scans to check for new devices and missing devices; security scans to check for vulnerabilities; configuration checks to identify unauthorised changes and many other functions. NSI Assist will significantly reduce the cost of first and second line problem determination and resolution, and routine maintenance. We also provide a traditional skilled engineering help desk and support service to our clients. For more information click on the links below:
Add information on engineering help deskService Management
See NSI Assist
Maintenance Services
We currently provide maintenance services to our clients throughout mainland UK. For more information see Support.
Managed Services
NSI Assist can be provided as a managed service. For more information see NSI Assist.
Mobile Communications
For information see:
Network Infrastructure
See the following links:
- ShoreTel
- Riverbed
- Network Infrastructure
- Meru Networks
- Wireless LAN
- Wireless Inter-Building
- Riverbed
- BlueCat DHCP/DNS/IPAM
Network Management
For information see
Network Security
Our Network Engineers and Security Professionals can provide a full range of network security solutions and services including preparation for PCI DSS and Government Code of Connection compliance. We have many years experience and a thorough understanding of the intricacies of network design and related security vulnerabilities. In addition to this, in combination with firewalls and other security appliances NSI Assist provides a managed Intrusion Detection and Prevention solution to your infrastructure. For more information click on the links below:
Relocation
We have assisted many of our clients through successful relocation projects over the past 25 years. We take care of all of your voice, data and video infrastructure requirements for your relocation to prepare before you occupy the new building or area, we plan and relocate ICT equipment and we manage third party service providers and equipment suppliers. We can provide a total service or we can provide additional resource to your existing team. See Project Management for more information.
Remote Access
It is relatively simple to provide a secure remote access solution with a reasonable performance for home users and those users gaining access through public Internet Hot Spots. Our Riverbed Remote Access acceleration solutions provide LAN performance for home and public Internet users and the equivalent of ADSL type access for 3G mobile access. This increased performance can seriously reduce the stress associated with mobile remote access. For more information see:
Systems Management
Some of our clients prefer our engineers to take full control and management of their network and communications systems. We operate as their ‘in-house’ network and telecommunications support team. For more information see Support.
Telecoms
See the Communications section and sub headings above.
Audio / Video / Web Conferencing
For information click on the links below:
Voice over IP
For more information click on the links below:
VPN
For information see
Wireless Networks
We have over 15 years experience designing, installing and maintaining wireless LANs and inter-building links. Our largest single Wireless LAN installation has 240 wireless Access Points, the largest wireless solution we have designed has over 350 wireless Access Points. We are experienced at delivering secure wireless networks to support voice, data and video networks in commercial, local authority and education establishments. For more information click on the links below:
ITIL
Our automated proactive help desk – NSI Assist – can significantly reduce your overheads in managing, retaining and monitoring documentation and Service Level Agreements. See NSI Assist.
Outsourcing & Managed Services
Consultancy
We provide consultancy service with a difference. Our consultants are all hands on engineers with many years experience providing advice based on our experience supporting and troubleshooting networks all over the UK and on some occasions into Europe and further afield. For more information click on the links below:
Helpdesk / Support Services / Service Management
We are launching what we believe to be the World’s first automated proactive help desk solution at the IT Directors Forum this year. Many years of engineering experience has gone into the development of NSI Assist. NSI Assist constantly gathers information on your infrastructure and establishes a baseline. In the event of a problem NSI Assist will analyse logs and traps and carry out a series of tests automatically to determine the cause of the problem. It will also attempt to resolve the problem and/or issue a fault ticket to the relevant vendor. NSI Assist will then monitor SLAs until the problem is resolved. NSI Assist will remember the resolution to improve performance in the event of a similar problem in the future. NSI Assist can automate routine maintenance procedures such as: network scans to check for new devices and missing devices; security scans to check for vulnerabilities; configuration checks to identify unauthorised changes and many other functions. NSI Assist will significantly reduce the cost of first and second line problem determination and resolution, and routine maintenance. We also provide a traditional skilled engineering help desk and support service to our clients. For more information click on the links below:
Network Management
For information see
Security
Our Network Engineers and Security Professionals can provide a full range of network security solutions and services including preparation for PCI DSS and Government Code of Connection compliance. We have many years experience and a thorough understanding of the intricacies of network design and related security vulnerabilities. In addition to this, in combination with firewalls and other security appliances NSI Assist provides a managed Intrusion Detection and Prevention solution to your infrastructure. For more information click on the links below:
Testing
We provide comprehensive network performance benchmarking including application testing to establish the impact of a new application on your network prior to go live. We work with your application development vendor on your behalf and if appropriate liaise with your developers to make changes to their software to improve network performance. For more information click on the links below:
Security
Telecommunications & Network Security
Our Network Engineers and Security Professionals can provide a full range of network security solutions and services including preparation for PCI DSS and Government Code of Connection compliance. We have many years experience and a thorough understanding of the intricacies of network design and related security vulnerabilities. In addition to this, in combination with firewalls and other security appliances NSI Assist provides a managed Intrusion Detection and Prevention solution to your infrastructure. For more information click on the links below:
Security Architecture & Design
Network Engineers and Security Professionals can design a secure network architecture. Alternatively, they can advise on changes (if required) to your existing network and underwrite your existing design. For more information click on the links below:
Consultancy & Strategy
Strategic Guidance
We provide strategic guidance to our clients to ensure their ICT infrastructure fully supports their business now and in the future. We take time to understand your business to enable us to provide appropriate advice. For more information click on the links below:
Green IT
This is a relatively new area for us but it is rapidly becoming the most requested service by our clients. We provide a number of solutions to reduce the energy consumption and carbon footprint. The government are also demanding businesses to reduce their carbon emissions through the Carbon Reduction Commitment scheme. We offer a free survey and brief report as an introduction to our Energy Efficiency services. As a result of some of our recent surveys, our clients are going to save significant sums in energy costs and reduce their carbon footprint considerably. For more information click on the links below:
Compliance
This has been another key area for our clients over the past year. We have been working with our clients to bring their network infrastructures in line with PCI DSS and Government Code of Connection compliance. For more information click on the links below: