Cardiff’s growth sectors including creative industries, fintech and medtech are being future-proofed thanks to the city’s new hypercity network.
Elevate, a business internet and managed IT network service provider, has built a 174 km high-speed network of fibre-to-the-premises infrastructure in the capital.
Cardiff is the sixth city to become an Elevate ‘hypercity’ – meaning it is one of the most digitally accessible cities in the UK. The project has been delivered through a public-private partnership with Cardiff Council and Welsh Government.
The network gives Cardiff its own independent, state-of-the-art, 10 Gbps capable fibre infrastructure, alongside managed WiFi networks and cybersecurity services which are also provided by Elevate.
Elevate says the hypercity network means that sectors which typically need fast upload and download speeds and which are set to become even more data-driven in coming years can have confidence that the infrastructure in Cardiff will match their needs.
Speaking on the Elevate podcast series Powering Cardiff’s Digital Future, Awen Evans, Cardiff Hypercity Manager for Elevate, said:
“Cardiff is a hub for fintech, creative and media is growing here, and also pharma. These are all bandwidth-heavy sectors.
“The fact that this network is 10 Gbps [gig] capable means that your business is future-proofed.”
According to Invest in Cardiff, more than 15,000 people are employed in creative industries in Cardiff, with 7,000 undergraduates enrolled in creative and media courses in the city. The capital has particular strengths in broadcasting, TV and film production, it says.
Gruff Vaughan, Founder and Co-CEO of video production agency Storm + Shelter , told the podcast that when the business moved to new city centre premises the cost of the type of connection the business needed from a traditional provider was too high for it to manage.
The Elevate hypercity network, however, offered the business an appropriate level of connectivity at a lower price, with room for the business’ data requirements to grow.
Gruff said:
“Elevate's network is 10 gig (Gbps) capable. I think the majority of businesses probably don't even need 10 gig at this point – 1 gig is plenty fast right now. But if something happened where our workflow changed and we really needed a much wider pipe, so to speak, in order to get all this work up into the cloud, I know that we'd be fine with Elevate to do that.”
Andrew Stout, Elevate’s Group Marketing Director, said the hypercity network offers Cardiff businesses benefits beyond connectivity, including support on cybersecurity, WiFi design and heat-mapping of offices and provision of diverse connections, meaning that businesses have an automatic failover backup if their superfast connection is temporarily disrupted.
Gruff said that resilience of his firm’s internet connection was essential, adding:
“If for whatever reason I turned around to my staff and said, ‘Sorry guys, the water's not working this week,’ I'd get a few ‘Oh okay, you know, fine’.
“But if I told them the internet wasn't working, it would break out into chaos. It's the modern equivalent of a snow day. If we didn't have internet here, I'd just have to send people home because there'd be no point anybody being here.”
To find out more about the Cardiff hypercity network provided by Elevate visit: https://elevate.uk/hypercities/cardiff
Listen to the Elevate podcast Powering Cardiff’s Digital Future here:
