Framlingham Technology Centre is upgrading its fibre
network to support Gigabit Ethernet.
The Suffolk-based Centre opened its facility in 2001, housing a
fibre cable network for 21 technology and communications firms that
transfer massive files on a regular basis. The company decided to
roll out fibre from the back end to the desk, so that it could
future-proof its bandwidth requirements.
Since then, it has upgraded on a regular basis to support
features such as fast VPNs, smart white boards, a presentation
theatre and videoconferencing.
Framlington Technology Centre’s Tony Stockman said, “Fibre gives
you virtually unlimited bandwidth - it is robust and designed to be
expanded, re-used and re-arranged.”
He found that implementing a fibre local area network (Lan) was
cheaper than Category 5E copper. He added that when they began to
build the network, the mechanical and electrical engineers were
fitting protective trunking to cover the Ethernet cables, which
added to the cost
“We thought, why are we paying for all this? If you use fibre,
you can lay it in any tray, as long as it’s not coiled up,”
Stockman said. In addition, interference from power lines was a big
issue for copper cabling.
At the time, suppliers gave widely differing quotes for laying
either copper or fibre cables. “We had plenty of quotes to
flood-wire the building with Cat 5E,” said Stockman. “So many
suppliers tried to put us off, saying fibre was not the way forward
for a centre like ours, but we were not swayed.”
Another concern was that some fibre quotes came in at three
times the cost of others. Framlington chose Cambridge Online, which
offered to lay 17km of fibre cables for less that £30,000 including
switching hardware.