National Exhibition Centre to get £2m network upgrade

Technology will be provided by Freedom Communications and Alcatel-Lucent

The National Exhibition Centre (NEC) just outside Birmingham is investing £2m in a new network from Freedom Communications and Alcatel-Lucent.

The network covers 190,000 square metres of exhibition space across 20 interconnecting halls.

The part of the network that will support events internet traffic has been designed using the IEEE 802.1QinQ (formerly 802.1ad) standard and an aggregation layer of switches to provide an additional separation of Layer 2 traffic before termination on a new pair of Fortigate 310B UTM Series Firewalls.

The conference centre will see the installation of 120 Alcatel-Lucent OS6400 switches, three -uarters of which are replacing older network hardware. Network management is being handled using a new installation of the Alcatel-Lucent OmniVista 2500-2700 series platform.

The upgrade will consolidate multiple physical networks, including the event and corporate networks as well as a range of access control and security networks. It will also reduce hardware duplication and provide a scalable, higher capacity network.

The NEC expects to see the new infrastructure in place by the autumn.