New fibre-optic link to help Dundee Council to downsize

Fibre optic infrastructure provider CityFibre has completed a project to connect Dundee City Council's new headquarters to one of its datacentres, as part of a £270m reinvigoration of the city.

The council expects the high bandwidth now available thanks to this link to enable efficiency savings as it hopes to downsize some of its premises and allow more staff to work remotely.

The public authority's headquarters now offer desks to just 80 per cent of its staff at any one time, relying on hotdesking and remote access for the remaining 20 per cent.

Ged Bell, head of IT at Dundee City Council, said that CityFibre was able to meet the council's bandwidth requirements.

"This was a flagship project for us; it was a vital part in the whole Waterfront development. CityFibre's dark fibre technology provided us with exactly the capacity requirements that we needed."

The 10-year contract was originally signed with CityFibre in October 2010. During January this year, the council altered its initial specification to include the installation of an additional eight fibre pairs, four on each route.

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