A connectivity backbone for a multi-let office on Broad Chare, Newcastle

The situation

One Trinity Gardens on Broad Chare is a multi-occupancy office building in Newcastle upon Tyne. Its owner and its managing surveyors had commissioned a WiredScore assessment of the building, the independent standard that rates how well a building is set up for connectivity, and it had certified at Gold.

They wanted Platinum.

That is not a vanity exercise. A connectivity rating is one of the few things a landlord can put in front of an occupier that is assessed by somebody other than the landlord, and in a multi-let office it speaks directly to the question every incoming tenant asks: how quickly can we work from this floor.

What was at stake

A building's connectivity rating is a statement about the asset, and improving it means improving the asset rather than the marketing. The work had to be real infrastructure, installed into a building that was already occupied and trading, without disrupting the tenants already in it.

The building also had the ordinary problem of every multi-let office. Each new tenant arranged their own connection, waited for it, and lost time before they could work. That is a letting delay, and letting delays are void costs.

What Fuse did

1. Put two leased lines into the building, on two separate routes. A one gigabit leased line delivered over fibre as the building's shared backbone, and a wireless leased line alongside it, transmitted from a point on a neighbouring building to a receiver mounted on the roof here.

That gave the building two things at once. It gained a connectivity asset of its own, rather than a collection of separate tenant lines. And it gained genuine route diversity, because the two connections do not share a path. The fibre runs through the ground. The wireless link does not go near it. A cable cut during street works, which is the most ordinary way a building loses its connection, takes out one route and leaves the other running. The wireless route also needed no street works and no wayleave.

2. Partitioned it so every tenant takes a share, before they move in. Incoming tenants take a portion of the backbone, typically between 10Mbps and 100Mbps sized to what they need, and can be connected before they occupy rather than after. Existing tenants in the building were offered the same. Connectivity stopped being something each occupier procured and waited for, and became something the building already had.

3. Added a managed guest network. A guest Wi-Fi network across the building with access controls and content filtering in place, so visitors and common areas are served properly and the landlord is not carrying an open, unmanaged network on the asset.

The result

The building has a one gigabit backbone of its own, a guest network with proper controls, and a connectivity proposition it can market: take a floor, take a share of the building's connection, and be working from the day you move in rather than weeks later.

The WiredScore certification uplift the owner set out to achieve was the reason for the work, and the infrastructure behind it is what makes the rating true rather than claimed.

The same owner and the same surveyors went on to apply the identical specification to Stockbridge House, the neighbouring building on Trinity Gardens, so the estate now offers the same connectivity proposition whichever building an occupier takes.

The point

Most multi-let offices treat connectivity as each tenant's own problem. The consequence lands on the landlord anyway, as a slower letting, a delayed rent start and an occupier who is frustrated before they have unpacked.

Building the connection into the asset instead changes what is being let. The floor comes with a connection already there, sized to the tenant and live before they arrive, and the building holds an independently assessed rating that says so.

Two connections on two separate routes then adds what a single line cannot, however good that line is. One runs in the ground and one does not, so the failure that takes out the street does not take out the building. In a multi-let office that is the difference between an outage the tenants hear about and an outage they sit through.

That is what Fuse now delivers as a Pre-Connected Property, and One Trinity Gardens is what it looks like in an occupied, working building.

Check any UK commercial address free at connect.fusecore.co.uk.