KEDINGTON DELIVER PHASE 1 AND PHASE 2 FOR MBNA
 |
 |
World's largest independent credit card vender chooses high performance GigaSPEED XL Solution for fast growing facility in Ireland.
By the time MBNA Europe Bank Limited (part of the global MBNA Corporation)
opened its US$33 million operations centre in Carrick-on-Shannon
in July 2001, it was already planning expansion. Construction on
Phase 2 started soon afterwards and has now nearly doubled the size
of the original 6,400m2 facility, providing accommodation for a
total of more than 700 people.
When choosing the cabling infrastructure to serve the new facility, MBNA selected Kedington and the SYSTIMAX GigaSPEED XL Solution. This cabling, now connects nearly 3,500 voice and data outlets throughout the building. Backbone connections between the building's communications room and the original building use singlemode fibre and LazrSPEED multimode fibre.
This infrastructure now serves departments including Administration, Security, Facilities, Operations, Finance, Personnel, and Telemarketing. All of these functions depend on fast, reliable data communications that can be scaled to meet rapidly growing network traffic. Much of this traffic is the input and output from MBNA's wide area ATM network that links with other company sites in Ireland, the UK and worldwide.
Installation of the 3,500 outlets and 27km's of Avaya cabling in the two-storey building was completed in six weeks by Kedington Group. In the communications rooms, we installed compact SYSTIMAX 110 patching hardware. This enables the moves, adds and changes to connections that are essential as systems adapt to evolving business needs. All this equipment was installed and tested within the MBNA deadlines, enabling the company to open its new facility on time in December 2002.
The cabling currently supports 100BASE-T network applications, but it is planned to adopt 1 GB/s technology when required by new, high bandwidth applications. MBNA is already using the network to connect building management systems and intends to run video conferencing over its LAN in the near future.