HERE East Offers Own Fibre Network For Tenants

Here East, the tech hub based at the former Olympic Park broadcast and press centres, is building a campus-wide fibre network to aid the businesses based on the site.

The network will deliver campus-wide public Wi-Fi with speeds of up to 1Gbps, a cross-connect platform that allows tenants to connect to all services on the campus and connections to the main data centres in and around London.

BT Sport, Ford’s mobility innovation centre and Ladbroke’s Coral’s tech hub are all located at the centre, which houses numerous startups, businesses and educational institutions. They will be joined by Football Manager developer Sports Interactive in the near future.

Here East network

Here East said it wanted to protect tenants from London’s ‘infrastructure challenges’ which have led to long waits for network installations and higher costs than elsewhere in the country.

It will own the network management system, which will be managed by Optimity, and claims new connections will be made within five days.

“This is part of our vision to deliver the most connected campus in Europe – where businesses, entrepreneurs, universities and technology experts will come together to experiment, build and create,” said Gavin Poole, CEO of Here East

“Typically in London, tenants are left with the responsibility of arranging all their own technology infrastructure, including organising the installation of their own internet connection. The landlord needs to deal with a mass of administration required for this equipment to be installed and the tenant has to endure long lead times and high costs. At Here East we take all this pain away so any company joining us (large and small) and universities can be productive as quickly as possible.”

Central London has surprisingly been plagued by a lack of affordable superfast broadband options owing to the high density of businesses in the area when compared to residences. The City of London is investing in gigabit Wi-Fi while a number of other providers have made efforts to improve connectivity.

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