ICT master plan for a smart community

Business need

The development, in one of Australia’s capital cities, is an exciting new business, retail and residential precinct. The developer promises to make it one of the most technically advanced and sustainable business precincts in the world.

ICT plays a crucial part in achieving this vision, and in establishing the precinct as a new business hub and smart community.

The brief was to provide unprecedented technology opportunities for everyone who lives in, works at, and visits the precinct: commercial and retail tenants, employees and customers, residents and visitors.

This requires an integrated communications network to deliver communication services over a common precinct network infrastructure. It must meet today’s internet-centric demands, while embracing innovation that anticipates tomorrow’s needs.

Outcome

Frame’s ICT master plan delivered the tactical and strategic framework to design all property and technology services for the precinct.

An industry leader in ICT strategic planning, Frame incorporated its knowledge of best-practice business and ICT principles into every aspect of the design, ensuring the integrated communications network will meet the immense vision for the precinct.

The ICT master plan consolidates, rationalises and reduces duplicate infrastructure, where possible. And it increases the resilience, reliability and flexibility of existing communications infrastructure which will be incorporated into the network. An optimised campus network, it will deliver tangible savings in capital expenditure during the design and construction phase and will reduce operating costs because the ICT infrastructure serves both property and technology services.

To achieve this, Frame’s design is modular, flexible and scalable, built around a common backbone, and independent of any particular vendor’s equipment or system protocols. We incorporated intelligent building design, enabling internet, big data and building technologies to converge on a single management platform.

By anticipating and designing for change rather than provisioning specific technologies, Frame has helped to future-proof the ICT infrastructure to meet the evolving needs of workplace, retail and residential environments. In addition, Frame’s ICT master plan minimises impact on the environment as it uses ecologically sustainable design principles for efficiencies in operating the technology.

Another feature of the design is that it enables each building and building cluster to have independent survivability so that buildings can function autonomously in the event of a disruption at the network core.

What’s more, Frame’s ICT master plan has created a blueprint which the developer can use for future campus projects.

With the rapid development of communication technology towards the Internet of Things (IoT), Frame developed an ICT master plan for an integrated communications network that supports immediate and future capabilities for:

• • building engineering facilities (mechanical, lighting and electrical, and building management system) including enablement of the building wide systems monitoring used IP based IoT devices
  • CCTV, access control, biometrics, radio frequency identification and user flow statistics
  • car park management systems
  • audio-visual intercom
  • digital wayfinding and signage
  • wired and wireless access
  • MATV, IPTV, free-to-air and pay TV services.

During the 6 months of work, Frame built a collaborative relationship with the site management and design teams — working closely with the developer, architects, building services consultants and others such as potential tenants — preparing the ICT master plan in parallel with construction designs and plans.

Starting with a discovery exercise, Frame inspected the precinct environment and reviewed concept sketches of the building architecture and services. In the next phase, the ICT concept was developed, followed by the conceptual schematic design and high-level telecommunications guidelines for the precinct.

The findings and designs from the discovery and concept phases were incorporated and further developed for the ICT master plan and detailed telecommunications guidelines. In turn, the developer included these in the precinct master plan.