Newport to get resilient fibre ring for community safety projects

Newport City Council has picked fibre optic infrastructure supplier CityFibre, with support from managed services outfit Logicalis, to help it install a high-capacity, resilient fibre ring network.

The project falls under the auspices of the UK’s Public Sector Network (PSN) network-of-networks, and will be designed to accommodate Newport Council’s growing community safety ICT estate across 50 sites, enabling it run CCTV, digital information boards, and traffic and alarm-monitoring applications.

The high-capacity network will also enable it to harness future smart city technologies as they are developed.

Newport City Council leader Bob Bright said the creation of such an advanced network was an exciting step for the city, Wales’s third largest behind Cardiff and Swansea.

“We are in a process of major transition in the city, with substantial regeneration and redevelopment. Community Safety is an absolute priority for the city, and I am delighted to see this partnership encourage a step-change in the services we provide,” said Bright.

CityFibre CEO Greg Mesch said that as the truly connected world moves closer to reality, city fibre networks would increasingly “act as the veins” to enable evolution and deployment of smart city technologies.

CityFibre and Logicalis noted that the project was entirely separate from the Public Sector Broadband Aggregation Network, the Welsh national PSN, which was built up by Logicalis over a number of years before the contract was handed over to BT in 2014.

“[Logicalis has] a huge amount of experience, particularly having run the UK’s largest PSN project for the past seven years,” commented Mesch.

“It is fantastic that they are brought into CityFibre’s model, and we look forward to exploring further PSN opportunities with them,” he said.

“We have been working with the local authorities in Wales for a long time and are continuing to build on that collaboration,” said Mark Starkey, Logicalis MD.

“There is huge potential to transform Welsh cities by installing future-proof fibre networks and support community-changing initiatives such as this through the exploitation of this infrastructure.”