Ask4 has chosen SICOM as its preferred provider of Dark Fibre connectivity to its sites in York, Bath, Southampton, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Lancaster, Falmouth, Sheffield, Nottingham, Cardiff and Birmingham with all sites expecting to be delivered by the end of June 2024.



Ask4 is a leading provider of Internet, smart building tech and IT solutions, delivering connectivity and technology services to hundreds of thousands of users internationally. Their goal is to support its clients’ aims and deliver the best connectivity experience to their residents.

Ask4 Ltd choose SICOM to deliver Dark Fibre connectivity

As the build of the dark fibre network progresses, SICOM will provide Total Care fibre support via its RADAR™  platform. RADAR™ is SICOM’s out-of-band monitoring device that is located in the comms room/data centre and monitors the condition of fibres in the network every few seconds.



It compares the losses along the fibre against a fingerprint taken at installation and immediately tells us if there is an attenuation incident (probably a fibre bend, trapped lead or poorly seated optic or lead) or a fibre break.

SICOM has been appointed by Focus Sensors Ltd as dark-fibre specialists in a new £1.49m project supported by the OFWAT Water Breakthrough Challenge and Severn Trent Water.

By 2030 the water industry must reduce leakage by 1 billion litres/day to ensure future water supplies. This requires step change innovation that is more accurate and affordable than current leak detection tools. This can be delivered by using fibre-optic cables already adjacent to water pipes as leak sensors. This concept was demonstrated in the first catalyst funding round (Dark Fibre 1). This project, Dark Fibre 2, builds on this work to solve remaining challenges, prove at scale and build industry confidence. The solution will then be brought to market to enable reductions in leakage whilst keeping customers’ bills low.

SICOM appointed as fibre specialists for new leak-sensing project

Focus Sensors’ IndusTM system turns standard telecommunications optical fibres into thousands of sensors. When connected to dark optical fibres within existing carrier network cables, Indus can be used to sense and locate leaks from water pipes.

Leaks are a major issue for water companies and this project, financed by the OFWAT Innovation Fund and supported by Severn Trent Water, will enable dark fibre leak detection to be demonstrated and brought as a commercial basis for adoption by water companies all over the UK.

SICOM are specialists in dark fibre and are a key part of the project. Our role is to provide dark fibre in five test areas. In doing so, we will develop a methodology to locate and commission fibre networks for leak detection using Indus.

The Centre of Excellence will be a purpose built site for world class research, testing and certification of rolling stock, infrastructure and innovative new rail technologies that will fill a gap, not just in UK rail, but across Europe.

The Global Centre of Rail Excellence (GCRE) is a world class facility for rail research, testing and showcasing of rolling stock, infrastructure and cutting-edge new technologies currently being built in South Wales. GCRE will become Europe’s premier site for rail innovation and serve markets both in the UK and across the continent.

As part of the development, a modular data centre will be built on-site to host its own IT and offer space for its clients using the facility. It was therefore imperative that the data centre could offer a wide range of connectivity to meet the clients’ needs.

FIBRE SURVEY AND CONNECTIVITY RECOMMENDATIONS



SICOM researched the area and found a number of options to connect to the government network, other data centres, the internet and Cloud Service Providers using either leased bandwidth or dark fibre for the “last mile”. The adoption of an Open Access Network Partnership with a suitable business ISP was recommended to provide fast and flexible provisioning of many services ranging from broadband-level bandwidth up to optical wavelengths. Openreach was contracted to provide diversely-routed multi-fibre cables between the site and two local exchanges in preparation for the data centre opening next year.

Our world is built on data. It’s all around us, growing in power and influence every day. We work to turn that data into something meaningful. We gather, analyse, combine and process it to help people and organisations achieve their goals – whether that means planning for a secure future or getting to know your customers better.

All data centres need connectivity, but public co-location sites need more choice and options than a private data centre, which only really needs diverse links from one or two providers. Multiple carriers bring competition in price and service. Some prospective tenants of the site may need specific carriers and if these are known to be available in the vicinity or have been pre-provisioned by the new owner, then this barrier to sale is removed.

Midlands Data Centre Fibre Survey

Therefore, when a private data centre is thinking about selling it needs to know what the options are for additional connections, because more carrier choice makes the site more valuable.

SICOM’s data centre survey team evaluated a privately-owned location in the midlands and found several other carriers nearby that could be connected diversely at a cost of less than £100,000. This is likely to have added many times this in value to the site because prospective buyers now know that having four or five carriers is easily achievable.

As a Data Centre Colocation Provider Carbon-Z can provide a range of both Retail and Wholesale Colocation Services across the UK to meet any of your needs.

Carbon-Z provide traditional rack based environments but more importantly and to meet market trends towards high density computing and GPU based workloads we have embraced immersion based cooling as their flagship default option and in addition lets not forget direct to chip cooling technologies.

Both technologies enable a highly sustainable and cost effective approach to colocation hosting.

ENHANCING DATA CENTRE CONNECTIVITY

Carbon-Z operates a data centre in Swindon providing a range of both retail and wholesale Colocation services across the uk and are leaders in immersion cooling. 

They needed to improve carrier connectivity as well as provide additional high bandwidth connections in the multi-100Gb range for prospective clients.

SICOM undertook a comprehensive survey of all carriers and dark fibre in the Swindon area and provided detailed options including costs to connect to each carrier using either dark fibre or dedicated fibre with multiple wavelengths.