The Client
Chesterford Research Park is one of the premier biotech and pharmaceutical research sites in the UK and a key component of the Cambridge Cluster. Based on a large, tranquil and beautifully landscaped site, Chesterford provides an ideal working environment for research-based organisations. Chesterford Research Park had originally allowed its tenants to source their own broadband and IT services. Because of its distance from the main telecommunications infrastructure, this resulted in higher costs, lower quality services for tenants than alternative locations fitting a similar profile. Most tenants were large organisations occupying complete buildings.
The Challenge
The new Science Village development, started in 2011, envisioned a different type of tenant, with a multi-tenanted shared infrastructure model targeting smaller companies in the BioTech field. It became clear that a different approach to broadband delivery would be necessary for the site to attract tenants. UltraFast Fibre-Optic broadband services at speeds over 100-megabits per second would attract these companies but the installation cost of nearly £5000 created a cost hurdle for new occupants.
Our Approach
Modern Networks (formerly Bridge Fibre) was called in by Chesterford Research Park to work with existing management and the Science Village joint developers to produce an approach that would solve the issue of providing services to new, smaller organisations, whilst, at the same time, delivering improved quality, value and choice for the existing larger tenants. The answer was to install a new, highly scalable fibre-optic infrastructure in the park that would enable all tenants to be offered a range of broadband products, IP telephony and other services. These services included high speed, unmetered low-cost products for smaller companies which were simply not available in the open marketplace and were just one of the benefits of building a shared infrastructure.
The Result
As a result of the success of our approach, we have now upgraded the infrastructure at Chesterford Research Park with a second external feed creating a fully resilient network. This guarantee’s reliability underlines the value of the approach, and at no cost to the tenants.
Park Manager, Katherine Maguire: “It has been a pleasure to work with Modern Networks to bring these additional connectivity options to our tenants. By continually assessing and enhancing the technology options available to tenants we hope that we provide the ultimate working environments – a pleasant and relaxing working atmosphere backed by the very latest technological solutions require by today’s R&D companies.”
