Case Study: 245 Hammersmith

With excellent transport links including the latest in cycle superhighways, the building is marketed as being ‘big on ambition’ and with neighbours like Virgin Media and Disney, it is not unreasonable to believe it is going to achieve them.

Requirements

Needless to say that these marketing and real-world ambitions come hand-in-hand with requirements for the equivalent in IT Infrastructure and Services to satisfy and accommodate the demands of global business tenants. That’s where the team at Onsite Technologies come in.

245 Hammersmith is a joint development by Legal and General and Mitsubishi Estate, backed up by property agents at BNP Paribas Real Estate and CBRE. Working on the building via an ongoing relationship with BNP Paribas, Onsite were set the overall project goal of fitting out the IT infrastructure of the building.

Now, ‘fitting out’ can mean a plethora of different things, but in this context, it truly meant going from no IT infrastructure (i.e. cabling, fibre etc) to the infrastructure required to run multinational corporates. This was to be no mean feat to say the least. To wrap the requirements in the single phrase “Onsite needed to follow best practice to future-proof the building using cutting edge technology” perhaps does not do the breadth of skills and knowledge required to deliver the project any justice whatsoever.

Challenge

The requirement came with the multitude of complexities you can reasonably expect from a brief such as this. Whilst working to budget will always be a key challenge to these types of projects, the monetary requirements were literally dwarfed by the physical and metaphysical scale of the task.

Nicknamed ‘The Big Red Workplace’, 245 offers 242,000 sq. ft. of space. Such a volume of space requires a cabling solution to match the complexity with dexterity toe to toe, not to mention an agile and dynamic approach to planning, project management and deployment.

Meeting the Challenge

To meet the challenge, there is only one solution that meets the current and future connectivity requirements as well as offering the flexibility required when cabling a new build such as 245, and that is blown fibre.

Working with engineering consultancy partners Hoare Lea, Onsite delivered and deployed a full blown fibre solution throughout 245 Hammersmith.

A method that effectively provides the carcass for creating diverse routing around the building, the blown fibre approach gave BNP Paribas the peace of mind that connectivity infrastructure could be provided with future proofing built in.

To ensure that 245 tenants could take advantage of the connectivity speed and quality offered by fibre, several unforeseen improvements had to be conceived and fleshed out on the fly. Returning to one of core benefits of working with Onsite, the ability to adapt to any given scenario, this adaptability would truly be put to test, in the form of mammoth, immoveable lift cores, if the solution was truly to be a success.

Originally planned out to tunnel through the lift cores, Onsite determined that the cost of using the required diamond drills could be avoided given that the blown fibre solution could, in fact, be optimised and re-routed to circumvent the cores saving considerable time and cost.

Off the back of the fibre solution, additional deliverables including the wireless infrastructure required for remote working throughout the building, and a vast zonal sound system for fire alerts, piping music and audio communications, were also delivered.

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