Specsavers has signed a £4.5 million five-year deal with Vanco to provide a broadband network spanning six countries.

Vanco is a virtual network operator and uses the infrastructure of multiple telecoms providers to offer what it describes as “flexibility at the cheapest possible rate”.

The Specsavers wide area network will link 800 sites and will allow for further growth in the business.

Specsavers IT operations manager Ruskin Snow said: “Vanco’s technical and carrier independence made a difference to the way that it approached our requirements and it will supply ongoing benefits.”

* Specsavers has completed its three-month project to extend an open-source IT directory services system to six countries. Working with Sirius, it has rolled out OpenLDAP integrated with Samba. This allows the optician to control employee access to data and applications based on their job roles and is an open-source alternative to Microsoft’s Active Directory system.