Jealott’s Hill campus is one of Syngenta’s largest research and development sites, with 100 buildings serviced by a local IT intrastructure.

Syngenta is one of the world’s largest agribusiness companies and a global operation with major production and research operations in over 20 countries. Syngenta invests heavily in Research and Development, collaborating with hundreds of universities, research institutes and companies worldwide. It is justifiably proud of its significant contribution to increasing the production of food from the world’s finite reserves of agricultural land.

Branch, in conjunction with HP, undertook the campus wide refit using singlemode blown fibre technology from Brand-Rex to provide maximum bandwidth and resilience for the sizeable base of power users across the campus.

The first task was to conduct a detailed survey of each and every cable route, pathway, riser and manhole using endoscope technology to ensure
there were no unexpected hazards.

Due to the sheer scale of the site GPS coordinates for each manhole, cabinet location and duct access point were established and used to
create a scale 3D model in addition to traditional CAD plans. This model and the GPS co-ordinates proved a huge asset to the team as key decisions could be taken remotely and very precisely without repeated visits to this very secure site.

Having completed the sizeable surveying and modeling operations, a 30km optical duct network was laid around the campus to accommodate the
dual routes to primary and secondary communication rooms. The individual ducts consisting of 2, 4 or 7 PTFE lined tubes were calculated to provide at least 50% capacity for network expansion without the capital investment
demanded by large quantities of dark fibre. Every individual tube was tested for integrity and finally pressure tested before being certified as sound and capped to prevent the ingress of water or other pollutants.

The Access Rack from Cooper B Line was selected by Branch as it best was suited to this mission critical application, and more than 100 racks were installed across the campus in preparation for the mammoth task of blowing in the 250km of singlemode fibre required for the primary and
secondary links to each location.

Once the singlemode fibre had been blown in, thousands of pigtails were fusion spliced for maximum longevity and the entire network tested to the client's specification at both 1310 and 1550nm in both directions before a final confirmation OTDR test.

Local communications were provided through some 6000 CAT5E outlets across the site with 50um blown fibre installed where necessary for building backbones. The business needs of the client dictated some buildings would remain occupied for the duration of works and Branch carefully constructed temporary 100 BaseT
Ethernet networks to support the user base while the huge volume of existing CAT3 cabling was removed and replaced with CAT5E. The careful planning of this part of the project ensured there was very little disruption to users and ensured adequate time was available to ensure the final switchover was painless.

The entire campus is covered by a 25 year warranty issued by the system manufacturer Brand-Rex.

This underlines both the manufacturer’s and Branch’s commitment to quality and guaranteeing transmission of all recognised Class D protocols over the infrastructure for a period of 25 years.

Branch also prepared an extremely detailed CAD system, based as installed routes, pathways and optic ducts; along with comprehensive test results in both hard and soft copy formats. System maintenance and subsequent moves, adds or changes are handled directly by Branch to ensure absolute quality and the essential continuous updating of the clients patching schedule.

Technical overview
> Backbone
Brand-Rex singlemode blown fibre backbone
Provision of Cooper B-Line Access Racks throughout the site
Dual direction OTDR testing
Full 25 year optical warranty issued

> Structured Cabling
9/125 singlemode blown fibre external links
50/125 multimode blown fibre internal links
Provision of Cooper B-Line Access Racks throughout the site
Brand-Rex CAT5E UTP cable
Brand-Rex CAT5E 24 port panels
Full Class D warranty testing
Full 25 year Class D warranty issued

> Disaster Recovery
Secondary comms room constructed
Redundant singlemode blown fibre links installed campus wide

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February 2010
Branch Technologies Ltd is pleased to announce the completion of the latest phase of an ongoing project for Cable & Wireless. The project; commissioned by Cable & Wireless on behalf of Royal and Sun Alliance was to implement and enhance their adoption of VoIP for their Pearl Centre campus near Peterborough. The installation was designed to address the requirements of 800 staff, via a 2600 point CAT6 UTP Brand-Rex installation. Spread over two buildings, supporting four new comms rooms (all built by Branch) the implementation featured OM3 50/125 Multimode fibre links x 240 between all comms rooms and server room; all with built in resilience and failover for the Cisco 6500 equipment.

Colin Pyatt of the RSA stated: “I pass on my thanks to you [Branch Technologies] and your teams for their efforts in the delivery at Peterborough. All parties involved have commented on the professionalism and exemplary attitude and approach displayed throughout the project by all Branch staff. This certainly gives RSA a high degree of confidence for forthcoming projects…”

Kelvin Ager, Managing Director of Branch Technologies commented: “Delivering exactly what the customer needs, within an agreed brief, to budget and on time is fundamental to the ethos of Branch Technologies”. “We now look forward to commencing the next C&W / RSA project and to the opportunity to promote Branch’s additional Realtime Environmental Management solution” (www.remprobe.com) he added.