Fusion delivers resilience and bandwidth for flexible managed offices
Fusion’s four-year relationship with flexible managed office operator Divisible Space has led to a contract to deliver connectivity for a 25,000 sq ft development in Stratford.
Divisible Space made first contact with Fusion when the company was beginning the fitout of its first flexible managed office building in central London.
Each floor of the seven-storey building at 27 Furnival Street off Chancery Lane is offered on a fully managed self-contained basis. The floorspace on each storey ranges from 1,250 to 1,650 sq ft with additional meeting rooms situated in the basement.
Thanks to a recommendation, Fusion was instructed to deliver connectivity and IT infrastructure to the building.
For the Divisible Space, choosing the right provider was a key decision. Connectivity is crucial to the company’s business model.
Divisible Space, as its name suggests, divides up the space in its buildings into self-contained floors that are licensed to clients on a flexible basis. To attract tenants, it is mission critical that the company can deliver bandwidth for its tenants.
Every client in the building has its own comms cabinet with a dedicated amount of bandwidth supplied to its own routers and switches.
Divisible Space CEO Rob Scriven explains: “Demand from potential office tenants for bandwidth has grown over time. We needed a solution that could deliver for us and our clients by allocating dedicated bandwidth to each floor.
He adds: “Fusion created this solution, and they provide ongoing support. Because they work with a multitude of providers, we are not locked into one Internet service provider, so we can maintain full resilience at all times. They offered exactly what we needed and have provided a first-class service since then. Our relationship has gone from strength to strength over time.”
Building on the success of the Furnival Street development, Divisible Space opened the doors in March 2023 at its latest acquisition, a 25,000 sq ft office building at Sugar House Island in Stratford, east London.
The development is on a 26-acre regeneration site with a mixture of uses from commercial office to residential and retail spaces. The wider site is due to be fully completed in 2025.
As with many locations in London, this part of Stratford presented challenges for Divisible Space and its ICT partners.
Although the new project is built on the same model, the floor plates at Sugar House Island are much larger, so prospective tenants are likely to be those looking for more of an HQ offering. If anything, that means the need to provide powerful and reliable bandwidth is even more imperative.
But there are limited suppliers to the Island. To allow for that, Divisible Space needed lines coming from different exchanges in order to provide full resilience.
Rob Scriven takes up the story: “Fusion quickly identified the best supplier for our needs and arranged a very quick install of a 10GB bearer with a 1GB bearer coming from separate exchanges, so we have a main and a back-up facility.
He adds: “Fusion have also arranged to offer dedicated bandwidth to each floor on a segregated basis, with full support, both hard wired and on WiFi.”
Fusion selected BT Wholesale’s RO2 product which provides two disparate connections, eliminating any single point of failure while managing seamless handover with the same public IP addresses.
Fusion’s Mark Castle explains: “It’s a true resilient solution where Openreach planners aim to achieve totally separate routing for the two circuits. That means, if one fails at any point, it seamlessly hands over to the other.”
At Sugar House Island, one leg of the system connects to Equinix LD8 DC Harbour Exchange at London Docklands and the other leg connects to Equinix LD7 in Slough.
The last word goes to Rob Scriven at Divisible Space: “I would highly recommend Fusion. They are very approachable and knowledgeable about all IT related situations. They will also find a solution and work quickly to get everything up and running with regular feedback. Their engineers and support team are exceptional, and Fusion are a totally rounded, professional company.”
About Fusion
Fusion was established in 2016 with the objective of providing value enhancing technology solutions to the commercial real estate sector.