Mott MacDonald is currently advising one of the largest developers in the UK on providing state of the art digital infrastructures on one of the largest developments in London. The site will include 10,000 homes and 3.5 million square feet of office space, along with retail and industrial areas. The aim is to provide a completely independent digital communications infrastructure and to allow service providers to utilise this infrastructure under a commercial agreement. The benefits to the community and businesses within the development is that they are guaranteed fibre to the home (FTTH) and premises with individual data speeds of at least 50MB. This level of connectivity and an open competitive infrastructure is highly attractive to potential residents and businesses. The site will be offering ‘early adopters’ of advanced entertainment, security and home management as well as media based businesses the latest devices and services. The site will consist of 10,000 homes, over three million square metres of office and retail space and an education college.

New builds offer the opportunity for brand new architectures, centering on Fibre to the Home. FTTH brings the prospect of an almost limitlessly upgradeable network, with less performance issues than traditional copper. FTTH also brings a new set of state-of-the-art network solutions dedicated to optical fibre. These solutions include Passive Optical Networks (PON), currently being adopted as standard in Asia and the US. Other advantages over copper and DSL include FTTH’s naturally ability to unbundle the local loop. Multiple service providers can run their services over a single fibre pair, avoiding many of the access issues that have restricted competition in the past. The fibre pair also naturally gives the opportunity for a synchronous offering, providing genuinely interactive services.

The services start with the ‘triple play’ of voice, internet and TV and the increasing expectation that they will be delivered as a package to consumers. The bandwidth demands for triple play are increasing rather than decreasing, despite advances in compression techniques. The desire for genuine broadband is accompanied by the rollout of both Voice over IP and high definition TV (HDTV). HDTV is very popular in the United States and requires up to 20Mbps, including satellite feeds. Beyond triple play, new services that can be enabled by FTTH include:

• Tele-education
• Tele-medicine
• Online gaming and gambling
• Home teleconferencing
• Remote control of appliances
• Virtual security systems
• Home care systems

Mott MacDonald is leading the client through a formal procurement process to select the best partner to build this next generation network and is also advising them on commercial partnerships to deliver state-of-the-art services.