The Cantonal Hospital Glarus is the hub for health care in the region. For over 130 years, it has provided medical expertise for the population of the Canton of Glarus and neighbouring regions. The hospital has qualified specialists, a wide range of medical services and state-of-the-art technology and infrastructure.

In 2010, the IT department planned the expansion and modernisation of communication and entertainment systems for patients. All beds were to be equipped with multimedia terminals that allow patients to surf the Internet, listen to the radio, watch TV programmes and make phone calls. For radio/TV reception, two variants were considered: the installation of a parabolic antenna with local conversion of the signals into an IP stream or a professional TV over IP solution, in which the signals are delivered by the provider as an IP multicast stream. TV over IP was chosen and various providers were contacted.

UPC Business offered a sophisticated total package with three variants, including fibre optic connection and Internet service with SDSL backup. Since the other providers were unable to present a comparably well-structured offer, the choice fell to UPC Business. For telephony, a different provider was deliberately chosen so as not to be completely cut off from the outside world in the event of a network failure.

The hospital buildings were connected redundantly to UPC Business’s fibre optic network in 2011. The hospital receives 85 HDTV channels and 112 radio stations as IP Multicast Stream via the fibre optic connection. The signal is distributed in the house via the LAN to the BEWATEC hardware. The bandwidth available for TV over IP is 800 Mbps.

The hospital uses the same connection for business internet with currently 300/300 Mbit/s. The Internet service serves the entire hospital, including patients and visitors. Since the hospital cannot afford a breakdown of the Internet connection, UPC Business has also provided an SDSL connection as a backup. Its bandwidth, although smaller, is sufficient to temporarily guarantee vital data traffic.

TV over IP requires a glass fibre connection. UPC Business agreed to build a fibre optic line to the cantonal hospital.

At the suggestion of the customer, the TV over IP service was migrated to a new platform which offers better quality (HD) and more channels in 2019 .

As of: October 2020