Case Studies

Infrastructure

Established in 1893, Writtle College has been producing leaders in the land-based industries for over 100 years.  It is one of the oldest and largest specialist university colleges, supporting careers focused on Business and the "Green Industries", and has a well established international reputation with numerous links across five continents, including North America, Asia, Europe, Africa, and Australasia.

Writtle College is one of the premier colleges in the country and wants to maintain that position.  In 2005, the college started to develop a strategic plan with an aim to ensure it remains a successful and attractive place that students, staff and village residents can be proud of.

The development is set to run until 2021, and will mean significant changes be made to the campus.  As a starting point for this, an alternative fibre route became a necessity.  The college needed to upgrade its fibre connectivity between two Server and Network rooms placed at opposite ends of the college campus, separated by a main road.  This new diverse fibre link would back up the existing single route, which would be at risk during any construction on the site.  Losing the link between the sides of the campus would be disastrous to their whole IT network, and therefore back up was vital.

Working with Paul Cave, Market Development Manager for Mayflex, Writtle College has installed a new route, comprising of 2 x 12 core singlemode fibre cables drawn through and terminated at each end in the current Network and Server rooms.  The complete route is almost 1km in length.

The installation took place in January and February 2009.  There were a number of delays due to the weather, including extreme flooding at one point, making it temporarily impossible to work on the installation; but the final solution was successfully handed over in March.

The college has seen huge benefits from the installation.  They are now able to relax and move forward with the development of the campus, as well as being able to now operate an effective back up for both academic and corporate data on the campus.  With huge plans ahead, having reliable and secure fibre connectivity has been invaluable to them and will continue to be so for many years to come.

• Download PDF Document