Alan Mottram, President, Alcatel-Lucent, North West Europe (left) and Roger Kelly, Chief Executive of Gateshead Council, following the signing of the Joint Partnership Agreement at Gateshead Civic Centre
Gateshead Council has joined forces with a major international telecoms company to connect the region's most strategically important employment site to the international business broadband superhighway.
Alcatel-Lucent Telecoms, one of the world's largest telecoms companies, has joined Gateshead Council as partner in a new joint venture company to develop a high-capacity open access network to serve the Baltic Business Quarter development.
The partnership, called Gateshead Technology Innovations Ltd (G-ti), was announced yesterday at this year's Broadband World Forum Europe in Brussels, the international IT industry's premier conference and trade show.
When complete, the state-of-the art optical network will support services such as video conferencing, video on demand, streaming media, data storage and protection, disaster recovery and image processing. The system will boast massive bandwidth and built-in resilience of a standard only available in very few locations in the UK, and as good as the best in the world.
Work has already started on the installation of miles of underground fibre optic cables right across the Baltic Business Quarter site. The system will be up and running by early Spring 2009.
Leader of Gateshead Council, Councillor Mick Henry, says "The launch of this new partnership is an exciting and ground breaking step forward in our continuing drive to bring more top quality businesses and jobs to Gateshead.
"We want the Baltic Business Quarter to be a showcase development with the best communications technology available today, as part of a compelling overall package offering the infrastructure that top class organisations need to do business here.
"Our aim has always been to attract major employers to create high quality jobs and make Baltic Business Quarter an unparalleled location for creative industries. Today's announcement puts that aim right on track
"This is a major investment and a bold step forward for Gateshead. We think investors will be very interested in what we now have to offer.
Alan Mottram, President, Alcatel-Lucent, North West Europe , says: "Baltic Business Quarter will be a vital part of the UK broadband infrastructure, and one that Alcatel-Lucent is proud to be associated with.
"The ability for enterprises at Baltic Business Quarter to get the very best in service and data speeds, with world-class resilience and flexibility built-in from the beginning, ensures they will be able to deliver high quality products and services to their customers."
With the G-ti infrastructure already in place, companies located in the Baltic Business Quarter will be able to contract with the communications service provider of their choice. Competition between service providers is anticipated which could lead to cost benefits for the occupiers.
Its world-class telecoms infrastructure will provide Baltic Business Quarter with a unique selling point, attracting businesses - especially sophisticated users of ICT - to Gateshead and in turn create thousands of high quality jobs. It is also believed that Gateshead's and Alcatel-Lucent's joint venture company may become a model for telecoms services in other parts of the country.
Both Gateshead College, who are already based at Baltic Business Quarter, and the Open University who move in later this month, are understood to be keen to use the open network in the future, and see exciting opportunities to develop and deliver learning using the technology it enables.
Details of the services to be offered to Baltic Business Quarter tenants will be outlined later in the Autumn.