Royal Navy Museums Broadband Services

Royal Navy Museums currently operates on an MPLS network for broadband services as described in section 2 and is considering keeping this arrangement for the future. An MPLS network will need to provide inter-site connectivity for all Museum sites listed, redundancy at every layer, a centralised internet breakout, plus firewalling and management services.

As part of the firewalling services, the Museum would like to have visibility over the firewall logs and rules, with the ability to add/edit/remove rules in a timely manner (such as through a secure online portal), without needing to rely on an external supplier or support teams. It would also be useful for the internal team to have clear visibility of bandwidth usage across sites and an alerting system in place that will notify us if any circuit goes offline.

It should be noted that some of our sites will require DHCP services due to a lack of local DHCP servers on those sites. Therefore, any managed routers/firewalls deployed as part of an MPLS network will need to be capable of delivering DHCP services.

Each site requires a leased line connection as the primary broadband solution, with an appropriate backup solution in place and automatic failover should the primary line fail. The backup solution for the Portsmouth HQ site should also be a leased line. However, this should use a separate underlying telco for additional redundancy at this site. We appreciate that backup solutions for other sites may vary, depending on the available connectivity solutions, however leased line backups are not required elsewhere.

At the Portsmouth HQ site, there are multiple separate businesses sharing the broadband connection, each with a unique public IP address. There are also several devices and networks across the Museum which require a unique public IP. As a result, the Portsmouth HQ site will require a minimum of a /27 prefix allocation to accommodate the public IP requirements. There should be scope for us to increase this in the future, if required. Other Museum sites do not have as strict a requirement; however, they will require a minimum of 5 usable public IP addresses per site.

We are looking to increase the bandwidth available to our sites to help support the continued growth of the Museum and infrastructure changes implemented over the last few years. Individual site connections and requirements are included in the attached document.

Royal Navy Museums is considering moving away from the current MPLS setup and implementing an SD-WAN network to interlink the individual sites. For the proposed SD-WAN deployment, we would not require any centralised internet breakout, firewalling or management services that are usually associated with an MPLS network. RNM will also supply their own firewalling and routing devices for each site and manage the configuration and maintenance of these devices through an existing relationship with an MSP. In this scenario, the Museum will configure and manage the SD-WAN network and inter-site connectivity.

Each site requires a leased line connection as the primary broadband solution, with an appropriate backup solution in place. The backup solution for the Portsmouth HQ site should also be a leased line. However, this should use a separate underlying telco for additional redundancy at this site. We appreciate that backup solutions for other sites may vary, depending on the available connectivity solutions, however leased line backups are not required elsewhere.

At the Portsmouth HQ site, there are multiple separate businesses sharing the broadband connection, each with a unique public IP address. There are also several devices and networks across the Museum which require a unique public IP. As a result, the Portsmouth HQ site will require a minimum of a /27 prefix allocation to accommodate the public IP requirements. There should be scope for us to increase this in the future, if required. Other Museum sites do not have as strict a requirement; however, they will require a minimum of 5 usable public IP addresses per site.

We are looking to increase the bandwidth available to our sites to help support the continued growth of the Museum and infrastructure changes implemented over the last few years. Individual site connections are outlined in the attached document. The speeds mentioned are the minimum speeds required. We will be happy to consider proposals that are able to exceed these speed requirements, providing suppliers are able to offer this within the proposed budget.

To allow sufficient time to configure, test and schedule site changeovers to the SD-WAN implementation, the broadband lines should be installed and live as soon as possible, but no later than the 31st December 2026.