Case Study - Unipol

Partner – N/A
Customer – Unipol Student Homes
Service Supplied – Cabling, Cisco infrastructure

About Customer
Every year Unipol help over 20,000 college and university students to find somewhere to live in the private rented sector in Leeds and Bradford. In addition, they provide some student accommodation direct, housing 2,000 students including 194 student families in self-catering provision. A small group of houses (around 25) are managed on behalf of private owners and let through a Management Agreement to Unipol tenants.

Most of the stock available to Unipol is either owned or is leased under a number of partnerships with local housing associations, Leeds City Council or private companies. It is through these partnerships that Unipol has been able to develop purpose-converted, high quality accommodation specifically for students.

Requirement
Unipol are one of Vaioni’s long standing customers or almost 4 years now and we have worked very closely with them in all their developments. Unipol were to build a new complex of 250 rooms. A data point was to be installed in each room with Cat6 cabling terminating to several risers dotted around the building. The riser then needs to terminate to the main comms room where a 1 GB fibre run was needed to cope with the amount of traffic from each riser. Unipol required a solution cabling infrastructure and LAN to serve internet access to all the tenants. Connectivity requirements were either leased line or DSL with Firewalling and bandwidth management.

Solution
Vaioni were chosen to build the cabling infrastructure for Unipol due to our exceptional service on previous buildings, however this would be the first cabling project with Unipol. Vaioni were to install the full cabling infrastructure and to liaise with their project managers. Half of the rooms were filled with users, so all the cabling here had to be neat, tidy and quickly deployed to ensure as little disruption as possible. The cabling infrastructure was a mix of Molex and Connectix to deliver this cabling infrastructure. Vaioni deployed several thousand metres of cable to finish this project on time.

Vaioni were then appointed to deploy a full Cisco switching infrastructure. Vaioni have vast experience in this arena and deployed some dozen switches for this small setup. A mixture of Cisco 2950’s and Cisco 3550’s were deployed to provide 100mb to each end point and 1GB between the risers. Each switch was setup to auto config from our config management platform, QoS and virus control.