Plymouth Science Park Upgrades 120 Businesses to 100Mbps Broadband

Over 120 businesses on the 25 acre Plymouth Science Park campus in Devon (England) look set to benefit when the existing fibre optic based ParkNet infrastructure is upgraded to support “UltraFast” broadband speeds of ‘up to’ 100Mbps.

Strictly speaking the starting point for “ultrafast” is usually considered to be 100Mbps+ (except at Ofcom where they prefer 300Mbps+, possibly so as to remain BT and Virgin Media friendly) rather than “up to” 100Mbps, but we won’t quibble too much over that.

The existing network setup for the park reflects dual, high capacity fibre optic circuits that are served by two geographically separate Points of Presence (PoPs) on the Internet for added resilience. However in recent years’ demand has been on the rise and as a result the park now needs to adapt.

Statement from Plymouth Science Park

Over recent years, the nature of Internet usage and the average demand for capacity has dramatically increased and this next upgrade will allow the Park to continue to enhance its capabilities when providing Internet connectivity to our onsite tenants. As such, we are now working to implement these significant upgrades.

The monthly costs for each service have been marginally adjusted in light of these enhanced specifications. However, as always, tenants benefit from comparative lower rates when compared to external market.

As always, tenants in our co-working spaces – The Loft, Lighthouse and Launch Pad, will continue to receive their ParkNet Lite service free of charge.

Apparently existing ParkNet Connect (80Mbps down / 18Mbps up) subscribers will be upgraded automatically, while ParkNet Lite (12Mbps down / 4Mbps up) tenants will be able to upgrade free of charge (both options apply a 10:1 contention ratio).

On top of that there’s also a ParkNet Advanced service that drops the contention to 5:1 and offers a symmetric service of 50Mbps. You can also take a dedicated leased line style solution via ParkNet Private Bandwidth.

The upgrade itself will take place during late-January 2017 and end-users won’t need to make any changes. Meanwhile the new monthly rates will become applicable from 1st February 2017. Finally, ParkNet will be removing all usage caps in order to support a “truly unlimited experience“.