University Sites Connected by Dark Fibre Network
Virgin Media O2 Business has completed building a dark fibre network loop across eight university sites in Swansea, the Swansea Bay City Deal's Digital Infrastructure Programme has announced.
Dark fibre networks offer practically limitless capacity and speeds, with the innovative loop configuration ensuring a continuous data flow between educational sites.
This will benefit research, teaching and collaboration across the academic landscape. The network, which is only accessible to linked sites, will also provide secure, high-speed, and scalable connectivity, improving the efficiency of internal systems while providing increased capacity to increase to suit the demands of the sector.
The network will immediately increase bandwidth to 40Gbps, with the potential for 100Gbps between campuses in the future. This means all Swansea campuses are now connected at exceptionally high speeds that are usually only available at a single campus location, with future proofing for even higher speeds helping create a parity of experience for students across SA1 in both the short and long term.
This will enable high-flex teaching, ultra high-quality video streaming and immersive learning environments, while also supporting future research as well as smart campus solutions to enhance efficiency and sustainability.
The deployment of this infrastructure means that in the event of network disruption, traffic can be instantly rerouted, maintaining reliable connectivity and ensuring uninterrupted academic activity.
James Cale, of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, said:
'This is an exciting phase where we will now start to tangibly see the benefits of a dark fibre network across campuses. The ability to fully exploit technology within a class or research environment offers both academics and students a far wider range of opportunities, whilst making our sites more data secure. This is something that is widely needed to future proof further education in this region.'
This project realises the Digital Infrastructure Programme's ambition of ensuring public sector bodies have access to the best possible technological resources. It opens up limitless opportunities for collaboration between institutions and accelerates the pace of technological innovation across public sector services.
Cllr Rob Stewart, Leader of Swansea Council and Chair of the Swansea Bay City Deal Joint Committee, said:
'This is a fantastic milestone in the region's plan to adopt emerging technology into our public sector services. Creating more robust ways of collaborating, data sharing and ways of researching is a fundamental aspect of how we build best practices across our education and healthcare sites. This will open up more innovation opportunities in the future.'
The new network, which will be fully available by December 2025, will offer significantly improved capacity and speed, and will allow large amounts of data to be securely shared and saved. On completion, the dedicated dark fibre network will connect 36 public sector sites throughout Swansea and Neath Port Talbot, including local authorities, healthcare and education partners.
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