Digital Connectivity

Manchester is the only city in the UK to offer next generation broadband with ‘fibre to the premises’ allowing speeds of up to 100mbps in a true open access network. BT has recently completed a £575 million investment programme, which places Manchester 10 years ahead of other UK cities in terms of access to digital communications. At MediaCityUK 20 million metres of fibre delivers speeds up to 10 gigabits.

Being at a central UK location, all primary telecom carriers and fibre networks converge through Manchester. This makes it a principal access point for the North of England, capable of supplying all the networking and IT resources needed to succeed globally in business. Independent telecoms networks are available throughout Manchester and are based on multiple resilient dark fibre rings linked to the major data centres in the region.

THE UK’S SECOND INTERNET HUB

MaNAP – Manchester Network Access Point – is a major internet traffic hub that serves the UK’s access to worldwide networks. In 2009, MaNAP became Edge-IX Ltd and continues to operate the Internet Exchange on a not-for-profit basis offering conventional peering services for all IPv4 and IPv6 traffic at speeds of 100Mbps, 1Gbps and 10Gbps.

LOCAL COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS

Full networking capability is available throughout the city centre and at all employment locations within the conurbation. Services are delivered by a wide range of providers ensuring competitive costs. The choice of carriers available to businesses in Manchester’s key locations includes BT, Virgin Media, THUS and TalkTalk.

THE CLOUD

Manchester is at the forefront of developments around cloud computing. Companies driving innovations in cloud computing such as Cisco, Oracle and EMC are all located here. A key part of IBM’s new Manchester lab is looking at virtualised environments for cloud computing. Outsourcery, the UK’s leading provider of cloud computing solutions and mobile-centric Unified Communications to SMEs are head-quartered in Manchester. Several hosting and collocation providers such as UKFast and Daisy Group have invested in new data centres in Manchester to support cloud computing.