Applying the same connectivity specification across an owner's Newcastle estate
The situation
Stockbridge House sits on Trinity Gardens in Newcastle upon Tyne, a multi-occupancy office building in the same ownership, and managed by the same surveyors, as its neighbour One Trinity Gardens.
Both buildings had been assessed under WiredScore, the independent standard that rates how well a building is set up for connectivity. They had not come out in the same place. One Trinity Gardens had certified at Gold and was being taken to Platinum. Stockbridge House sat a rung lower, at Certified, and the owner wanted it at Gold.
The interesting part is not the rating. It is that the same owner chose to do this twice.
What was at stake
An owner with more than one building in the same location has a problem a single building does not. Occupiers compare. An agent marketing two buildings a few doors apart cannot credibly sell connectivity as a feature of one of them while the other is quietly weaker, and the weaker building becomes harder to let without anyone quite saying why.
Stockbridge House also started from a lower base than its neighbour. Whatever was done had to lift an ordinary, occupied, working building, not polish a flagship, and it had to be done without disturbing the tenants already in it.
What Fuse did
1. Applied the same specification, not a bespoke one. Two leased lines into the building on two separate routes: a one gigabit fibre leased line as the shared backbone, and a wireless leased line alongside it, transmitted from a neighbouring building to a receiver mounted on this roof.
One route runs through the ground and one does not, so the cable cut that takes out a street leaves the building running. The wireless route needed no street works and no wayleave. It is the same design applied to the neighbouring building, so the estate gained a consistent standard rather than two different answers to the same question.
2. Made the connection something tenants draw from. Incoming occupiers take a share of the backbone, typically between 10Mbps and 100Mbps sized to what they actually need, and can be connected before they move in rather than after. Existing tenants were offered the same. The building now supplies connectivity instead of each tenant arranging their own and waiting for it.
3. Put a managed guest network across the building. Guest Wi-Fi with access controls and content filtering, so visitors and common areas are served properly and the owner is not carrying an unmanaged open network on the asset.
The result
Two buildings in the same ownership, on the same street, now run on the same connectivity standard, each with its own gigabit backbone, tenant shares available before occupation and a controlled guest network.
The certification uplift was the reason the work was commissioned. The more useful outcome is that an agent can now say the same thing about both buildings, and mean it.
The point
Connectivity is usually treated building by building, which is how an estate ends up with one asset that lets easily and another that does not, for reasons nobody has written down.
Treating it as a specification instead of a project changes that. The same two connections on separate routes, the same tenant shares, the same guest network, applied across the buildings an owner holds, so the proposition is consistent wherever an occupier lands and the weakest building in the portfolio stops being the one that sets the tone.
It also shows the approach is not reserved for the best building on the street. Stockbridge House started a rung below its neighbour and was brought up to standard while fully occupied and trading.
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