York schools to benefit from 10Gbit/s network

York gets high-speed optical fibre network

The City of York Council has signed a £13.7m contract with network provider H2O Networks and communications specialist Pinacl Solutions to provide York with a 10Gbit/s dark fibre network.

The fibre network will eventually link to 67 schools and 14 libraries as well as the council offices.

Dark fibre refers to an unlit optical fibre network, which in this case will have absolute capacity of 10Gbit/s. When electronic optical access devices are connected to the optical fibre, and the fibre becomes "lit", network capacity can be distributed to different parts of the estate, normally in 100Mbit/s chunks.

Although the network will have the council's core services and applications running on it, the network's high capacity will also allow other services such as video conferencing, CCTV and a variety of Urban Traffic Management services to run concurrently.

With 24,000 pupils in the locality, York council also said that the scheme will mean it exceeds upcoming British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) guidelines for school connectivity.

City of York Council head of ICT Roy Grant said that owing to the bandwidth limitations of the old network, widespread adoption of some services had not been possible in the past.

But he said the new network offers greater opportunities: “Not only will we be able to connect existing council buildings and facilities, but the city-wide network will give us the potential to attract new businesses to York, offering them low-cost connectivity to the network."

The network rollout should be completed by September.