Swansea Bay City Deal’s Digital Infrastructure Programme is pleased to announce that Virgin Media O2 Business has completed building a dark fibre network loop across eight UWTSD sites in Swansea.
Dark fibre network offer practically limitless capacity and speeds, with the innovative loop configuration ensuring a continuous data flow between educational sites.
This will benefit research, teaching, and collaboration across the academic landscape. The network, which is only accessible to linked sites, will also provide secure, high-speed, and scalable connectivity, improving the efficiency of internal systems, whilst providing increased capacity to increase to suit the demands of the sector.
The network will immediately increase bandwidth to 40Gbps, with the potential for 100Gbps between campuses in the future. This means all Swansea campuses are now connected at exceptionally high speeds that are usually only available at a single campus location, with future proofing for even higher speeds, creating a parity of experience for students across SA1 in both the short and long term.
This will enable high-flex teaching, ultra-high-quality video streaming, and immersive learning environments, while also supporting future research, as well as smart campus solutions to enhance efficiency and sustainability.
The deployment of this infrastructure means that in the event of network disruption, traffic can be instantly rerouted, maintaining reliable connectivity and ensuring uninterrupted academic activity.
James Cale, Director of Digital Services at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David said:
This is an exciting phase where we will now start to tangibly see the benefits of a dark fibre network across campuses. The ability to fully exploit technology within a class or research environment offers both academics and students a far wider range of opportunities, whist making our sites more data secure, something that is widely needed to future proof further education in this region.James Cale, University of Wales Trinity Saint David
This project realises the Digital Infrastructure Programme’s ambition of ensuring that the University and public sector bodies have access to the best possible technological resources. It opens up limitless opportunities for collaboration between institutions and accelerates the pace of technological innovation across public sector services.
Cllr. Rob Stewart, Leader of Swansea Council and Chair of the Swansea Bay City Deal Joint Committee said:
This is a fantastic milestone in the region’s plan to adopt emerging technology into our public sector services. Creating more robust ways of collaborating, data sharing and ways of researching is a fundamental aspect of how we build best practices across our education and healthcare sites, that will only open up more innovation opportunities in the future.Cllr. Rob Stewart, Leader of Swansea Council
This new network, which will be fully available by December 2025, will offer significantly improved capacity, speed and will allow large amounts of data to be securely shared and saved. On completion, the dedicated dark fibre network will connect 36 public sector sites throughout Swansea and Neath Port Talbot, including local authorities, healthcare and education partners.