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COMMUNICA | Issue Four
There is a certain charm around
Cambridge, it’s a very special place
where the minds of the future study in
the suroundings of the past.
T
he historic city of Cambridge
is globally known for being a
leading powerhouse as a world
class centre for academia,
research and study.
The city’s university reputation
is internationally undisputed as one of the finest
destinations for ambitious school leavers and
experienced academics alike.
The instituition boasts amazing alumni, including
some of history’s most famous authors, poets,
scientists and philosophers - Isaac Newton, Charles
Darwin and Professor Stephen Hawking being just
some of the names associated with the university.
To remain at the top, universities continue to battle
for the top spots on global and domestic league
tables, battling to attract the best and brightest
students and the educational minds to teach them.
In this day and age, universities also require
outstanding fibre-based telecoms networks to
provide a service to their students and link their
campuses together.
Two and a half decades ago, before fibre was topical
in the commercial world, a forward thinking plan by
the University of Cambridge’s information technology
team began an evolution of what, today, has evolved
into a state of the art telecoms network solution.
Snaking its way from campus to campus, connecting
the university’s world famous colleges with ultrafast
internet speeds The Granta Backbone Network
(GBN) is a private fibre network which is jointly
owned between the University and 31 Colleges.
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“It is used to support and distribute the various IT
networks that the colligate university has, enables
the transport of data to and from our data centres,
allows connectivity to our High Power Computing
Facility and supports both internal and external
research and development,” explains Ritchie Carter,
GBN Manager.
“Work started on the initial phase, around 32 km,
in 1989 and was finished 1992, at a cost of £3.9
million.”
The first 15 years didn’t see much expansion but
as the digital age started, demand rose - now the
network now measures around 54km.
The network is made up of a series of ducts and tray
work which contain numerous fibre optic cables.
The original cables were composite, being a
combination of multi mode and single mode.
This allowed for short distant fibre circuits to be run
over multi mode, of which the components were
much cheaper, and yet cater for longer distance and
high bandwidth demands that require single mode.
The GBN was partly a replacement of an existing
private copper network which ran around the
University in the 1970s, connecting various sites/
departments to the mainframe computer, based
on the New Museum Site - which was where the
Computing Lab was based - Cambridge being
a pioneer of computing and computing science.
The other motivation was that institutions, such as
‘Classics’, wanted to be able to share information
electronically.
“There was also a copper network, which was used
for telephone, fax and security purposes, however,
as bandwidth requirements have increased, the
network has moved over to solely using single mode
fibre,” said Ritchie.
“This all pre-dates the internet, so it was assumed to
be an internal network used for research purposes
and assist with academia, however, much of the
traffic the network now carries goes out over the
internet, which goes to show how versatile the
network is.”
“Work started on the initial phase,
around 32 km, in 1989 and was
finished 1992, at a cost of £3.9
million”