Wireless ISP Connexin Details Plan for £5m Data Centre in Hull UK

Wireless ISP Connexin, which operates superfast broadband networks in East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire (England), has confirmed their plan to spend £5 million building a new data centre (CXNDC) in their home city of Hull so as to help it become “one of the UK’s leading smart cities.”

The new 200+ rack facility will require the provider to create 60 new jobs (engineers, technicians, sales staff and event managers etc.) and is being designed to support “tier-3” reliability specifications. Apparently it will also bring more than 40,000Mbps of data / internet connectivity to the region (40Gbps). Naturally the centre will become Connexin’s new HQ and businesses who use it will have the usual option of managed or co-located facilities.

Connexin has applied for planning permission with East Riding of Yorkshire Council to develop the facility on a 1.2-acre site at Bridgehead Business Park and has approached the Humber Local Enterprise Partnership’s funding programmes for support with their project costs. At the time of writing most of the centre’s capacity is claimed to have “already been acquired” by local customers but more is being added.

Furqan Alamgir, Connexin CEO, said:

“Hull is not hanging about in its race to become a smart city. Our investment is real, it’s happening and this state of the art data centre is proof of that. Hull is advancing technologically at pace and it’s a privilege to be part of it.”

Most of the money for all this is being supported by some £10m of additional investment, which the ISP secured last year from Digital Alpha Advisors (here). At the time Connexin said that they planned to focus on smart cities (e.g. public Wi-Fi), hire 100 extra staff and build a new data centre.

The move is a wise one, particularly given rival KCOM’s on-going roll-out of 400Mbps FTTP around Hull that is expected to complete by March 2019. Meanwhile Connexin had looked set to bid on some of the new 2.3GHz or 3.4GHz radio spectrum bands in Ofcom’s recent Mobile (4G / 5G) auction, although they dropped out of that just before it was due to begin (here).