Liverpool firms to benefit from new superfast digital exchange
A New super-fast broadband service for businesses will shortly be launched in Liverpool.
The £1m scheme, lead by AIMES Grid Services, will link Liverpool City Council’s existing fibre cable with new Virgin Media Business switching equipment and tier one provider Global Crossing.
Known as Fibrenet, the project to upgrade the city’s broadband infrastructure follows the publication in 2009 of the Digital Britain report and has been made possible by a £400,000 grant from the Technology Strategy Board (TSB).
It will create Liverpool’s first “digital exchange”. At the moment, London and Manchester are the only UK cities with such an exchange.
AIMES, based at Liverpool Innovation Park (LIP) on Edge Lane, has already signed up the BBC, Sony, UCI and Getty Images as customers. AIMES is also seeking local firms, hospitals, universities and other institutions which want to take part in an initial one year trial starting this July.
AIMES chief executive, Professor Dennis Kehoe, said: “Liverpool all of a sudden will become a high fibre connected city, not only enabling local businesses to benefit, but also attracting the trialing of new services, making Liverpool a digital destination, which it has not been previously. We will be able to compete with Manchester and on a national level.”
Liverpool City Council’s existing fibre network forms a ring around the city centre that links LIP with the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, the city’s universities, the business district, the Baltic Triangle and the region’s new enterprise zone covering Liverpool and Wirral Waters. The ring is currently principally used for CCTV for traffic control. Virgin’s new switching equipment will connect directly to a high capacity transatlantic cable that lands in Britain in Southport.
Fibrenet will have a capacity of 10 gigabytes per second and, according to AIMES, could save businesses up to 80% of the typical cost of a much slower 10 megabyte broadband service.
Liverpool is one of just five locations selected by the TSB to trial digital exchanges. Around 30 other places had applied to take part in the trial.
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