wired for success

WIRED FOR SUCCESS

Our region has just secured some major political objectives and is beginning to move forward.  The Cambridge City deal, planning permissions at Alconbury Weald and the decision not to toll the A14 are major political successes - but now under the new enlightened regime we must push forward with core digital connectivity.

We need to connect Cambridge with the Alconbury Weald Enterprise Zone and Alconbury Weald with the Cloud.  The solution is really simple and straight forward.

We need 1 Gbps "fibre to the premises" (FTTP) broadband to every significant business within the "Cambridge City Deal" area and also to every business on the Alconbury Weald Enterprise Zone (and adjacent business parks).  There are some major European switching nodes just outside the Alconbury Weald perimeter. We also need the highest capacity "fibre trunk" in the cable duct running alongside the guided bus-way route. This would link the Addenbrookes Biomedical Campus at one end with the Alconbury Weald Enterprise Zone at the other end. En-route it passes through the Science Park, the Microsoft research facility at the station, the St John's Innovation Centre, the new  Cleantech Incubator, and both Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire Regional colleges.  We need Peter Cochrane the former CTO of BT and the countries foremost high speed broadband advocate to lead this initiative - and this is exactly what he did for the Financial Services industry in Jersey.

By implementing this plan we create a true "Cluster of Clusters" and then we need to connect this "Super Cluster" to the Cloud.

Both the Cambridge City Deal and the Alconbury Weald Enterprise Zone should have a special technical status that allows for rapid deployment of the latest "Cloud of Things" communication technologies (most of which were developed in Cambridge but not deployed in Cambridge)

- LTE Advanced 

- Bluetooth LTE (with iBeacon technology)

- Zigbee IP

- Near Field Communication

- ISO 18000 Dash7  technology

- Next generation  ISO 18000 6c technology

Not only would this put our LEP region at the heart of the development of the "Cloud of Things" it would put Alconbury Weald at the heart of the "Cloud of Making Things"  It would also put the Cambridge Super-cluster forward as the only logical  place to develop the world's next 5th generation wireless technologies. 

This would be a massive attractor of really innovative technology companies to Cambridge, the GCGP LEP area and the new Enterprise zone at Alconbury Weald.

Written by Richard Wishart

#cloud #broadband #wireless #making