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SMART BUILDINGS
The future is
fibre
By Tom White, Director &
Richard Jeffares, CTO, Glide
Group
www.glidegroup.co.uk
Designing the next generation of
smart buildings with fast
fibre infrastructure
Fibre optic technology has become a crucial aspect
of future-proofing all commercial and residential
developments. Fibre infrastructure is the essential building
block or ‘digital plumbing’ required to enable smart
buildings within future smart cities. In turn, this empowers
entire societies with greater broadband speed and network
capacity over longer distances, and in doing so enables
developers and tenants alike to upgrade fibre-endpoints as
required for many generations to come.
In most cases, commercial or residential developments
are constructed within an asset life cycle or horizon of
30-50 years. Within that time frame, the building asset
needs to remain both marketable and saleable to an ever-
increasing generation of technically demanding users. It’s
therefore essential to now adopt a ‘fibre first’ strategy when
designing the underlying infrastructure that will power the
buildings digital performance in domains such as power
efficiency, environmental monitoring, smart automation,
occupant analytics and predictive behaviour. Outside
buildings, it has long been the case that fibre is replacing
copper cabling infrastructure, but the next natural step
in this movement is to extend the fibre footprint into the
buildings to provide true full-fibre connectivity.
www.networkseuropemagazine.com