KEDINGTON AND THE EU IN IRELAND

High speed networks infrastructure keeps EC Inspectors connected.

European Commission Food and Veterinary Office Picks SYSTIMAX Solutions and Kedington for New HQ in Ireland.

The new US$36 million HQ of the European Commission (EC) Food and Veterinary Office (FVO) at Grange, County Meath, is equipped with a world leading LAN infrastructure. The building's data network provides Gigabit Ethernet connections to every desk via GigaSPEED copper cabling connected to backbones built using the OptiSPEED multimode fibre solution. This infrastructure provides communications links needed by nearly 200 people of 14 nationalities to collaborate both with each other and colleagues worldwide.

Last year they completed more than 200 inspections working with national authorities in 52 countries and, in the future, this workload is set to increase rapidly.

In total the Grange facility includes more than 250 kms of GigaSPEED copper cable connecting 4,000 information outlets to seven communications rooms across the site. The majority of outlets are in six-way floor boxes made up with SYSTIMAX MGS 200 and 300 units. The communications rooms, equipped with SYSTIMAX 110 patch panels, are linked to the central computer room via the OptiSPEED backbones. These include 1,220 meters of 100-pair SYSTIMAX OptiSPEED indoor/outdoor cable and 420 metres of similar 25-pair cable.

The cabling installed in the 12,500m2 facility at Grange, 40Km northwest of Dublin, serves a pair of adjacent, two-storey buildings set in a nine hectare landscaped site. The buildings were constructed with recessed trunking in their concrete floors to accommodate cabling connections to floor-mounted information and telephone outlets.

To overcome space limitations in the trunking, Kedington carefully routed cables with regular drops down from cable runs above the ceiling. This reduced the amount of cabling at any point in the trunking to acceptable levels. A further pressure on some phases of the installation was the need to complete work against tight schedules and coordinate tasks with other fitting-out activity on the site.