Wired building offers wireless potential
Wired building offers wireless potential
This summer BT Ignite Solutions occupied a new headquarters building at Leavesden Park, one of the largest business parks in the south of England. The move enabled BT Ignite Solutions to rationalise its accommodation from six to just one building. It is also a building in which the potential for wireless operation was built in from the start.
Formed in 1997, BT Ignite Solutions is BT's eBusiness, broadband and communications solutions provider to business and wholesale customers around the world. It is already a £1.4bn business, with revenues growing at 25 per cent annually. It offers total communications solutions from basic LAN connectivity, through consultancy and design services to fully managed and outsourced voice and data networks.
BDP has implemented a design strategy in which the central street acts as the main artery of the building, connecting all of the principal spaces. There is a customer centre, a variety of meeting rooms, conference facilities with integrated AV, and a multi-media exhibition area. The "Workshop"restaurant serves meals between 12 and 2pm, and offers a choice of meeting,working and dining spaces for all day use. These include "flexi-pods" or semi-private areas designed for dining and working. The coffee shop and caféin the "street" are an extension to the working environment.
A Touchdown Centre offers a choice of flexible work settings for short-term users of the building, including the 400 staff usually based at other Ignite locations but able to use the facilities at the new HQ as required. The office accommodation is typically open plan with a mix of "owned" desks,hot-desking and flexi-desks for transient workers, study corrals (for semi-private study) meeting rooms and project rooms of various sizes. The office areas are also provided with "oasis" points and breakout areas.
Some 1,800 staff occupy the new 17,670m2 net accommodation. The building accommodates a full range of HQ functions and network management centres. The first staff moved in in mid-July, the rest following in a phased relocation through to December.
Comprising five, four-storey blocks linked by the internal street, the building also serves as a showcase building to demonstrate to customers what the company can deliver. The technical infrastructure ensures that the building is capable of supporting and demonstrating IT/IP and wireless technologies –the new offices have technology at their core. There has been significant enhancement of the BCO commercial standard installation supplied by the developer to provide integration of IT, security and building management environmental systems across a common cabling platform.
BT specified a significant resilience of power infrastructure, and this has been achieved by providing two generators to supply half of the building in designated areas with essentially backed power, and two static UPS which supply the comms rooms and almost a quarter of the building's small power requirement. A large main comms room contains Meridian equipment which has DECT capability,and server cabinets specified to meet BT Ignite's business needs. Power provision has been enhanced to satisfy the expected higher user demands and to give increased resilience by running the ring main HV cables through diverse routing with two transformers.
To accommodate its flexible working environment, BT Ignite Solutions specified that in specific areas in each of the five blocks and on each of the floors, additional chilled beams and radiators and control devices should be provided to allow for partitioning in future. Flexibility in placing furniture is provided throughout the building with the installation of an under-floor busbar track on a 4.0m grid, which allows for either floor boxes to be plugged in, or desk MCB distribution boards via floor grommets and plug in cable. Touchdown desks are served by plugging in the power distribution to the under-floor busbar.
Voice and data Cat 5E cable distribution has been flood-wired in the floor void throughout the building to provide flexibility to any communications requirements to the desks. Uniquely, a grid network has also been installed in the ceiling onto which a range of devices, ranging from security and temperatures sensors to wireless/Bluetooth devices, can be installed. These devices all run off the same cabling, eliminating the need for installing separate or additional wiring to meet the changes in the future.
For example, the company is only operating wireless in specific areas initially, namely the street, restaurants and café areas. Within two years, however, the expectation is that the entire working space will be wireless-enabled simply by adding appropriate devices to the existing ceiling grid.
The floor and ceiling cabling systems are integrated by a Honeywell integration package into a "smart" building. These include:
The fire alarm system (Honeywell) using FP200 cabling to satisfy fire regulations.
Lighting control (ECS) which programmes some relatively simple functions for improved maintenance operations.
The security installation (Initial Systems) uses the flood wiring provision,but to comply with the BS and NACOSS standards, the cables are directly connected to the devices and patched into lockable patch panels in the communication rooms.
The whole building seems to meet its original aims of being an efficient and flexible workspace and a showpiece for some modern technology applications.
