In six weeks’ time the first office building in SmartCity Malta will be inaugurated and the first tenant should be welcomed in. While work on the construction site continues, there is much more that meets the eye. Away from prying eyes, most of it underground, there’s a whole information and communication technology infrastructure that will cater for the demands of the companies that will operate from Ricasoli. Such an infrastructure will be so secure that it will be practically impossible to shut down SmartCity Malta.

“The ICT infrastructure at SCM was designed for global digital operations. As a result SCM will be the best and most reliable place to hold such operations,” Shadi Khoja, business development manager for ICT at SmartCity headquarters told i-Tech.

“This infrastructure also will be able to cope with any future technology breakthroughs and in my opinion this will fit exactly in positioning Malta as a regional centre of excellence between Europe and North Africa.”

Speaking from SmartCity Malta in Ricasoli, Mr Khoja illustrated to i-Tech how the ICT infrastructure is being built and how it will cope with the heavy demands of the international ICT companies that are expected to come to Ricasoli. The buzzword here is “reliability”.

SCM will be connected to the rest of the world via two separate fibre-optic cables on two different routes. These two fibre-optic cables are connected to a network distribution centre on the SCM campus. Any Maltese communications operator will be able to connect to it. This centre will be the main aggregation point of the entire network within SCM. Each building in the campus will be interconnected through this centre.

Then again, there are two different fibre networks going through the campus, which means that each building will be connected to two separate fiber cables. Each tenant in the buildings will be connected either through fiber or through Ethernet cables. The business partner will also have the flexibility to build its own network internally including wireless.

As from day one any business tenant can have up to a whopping 1gigabit internet connection direct to the office, and this can go further up on request. This is 20 times the 50 megabit connections offered by Maltese internet service providers at retail level.

“SCM will be most reliable to host data centres, disaster recovery centres, satellite TV centres and similar activities,” added Mr Khoja. “Innovation is busy at work here. The whole campus will be future-proof and ready for any technology developments that can happen. Anything from cloud computing to unified communications, online backups, IPTV, HDTV, 3DTV, and any bandwidth-hungry applications can be catered for by the ICT infrastructure being put in place.”

To make sure this ICT infrastructure and all the electronic equipment have the necessary power all the time, SCM will have its own electricity sub-station on campus. This will be fed by two separate supply cables from the power station. These power supplies go through separate dedicated tunnel, to minimise disruption. These two supplies are connected to two transformers in the sub-station. Each transformer can independently cater for all the requirements at SCM.

If these fail, each building will have two power generators working on fuel. One generator can supply the needs of the entire building all by itself. And in the eventuality that even these fail, there is a fourth level of redundancy, in the form of uninterrupted power supplies to provide power for the critical parts of the building.

Each building will have smart electricity meters and power consumption will be monitored. The so-called “buzz bar system” will be used to keep the levels of electricity stable and protect from fluctuations. This system will isolate a problem in a particular building, protect the rest of the neighbours and help to rectify it.

The ICT infrastructure is also critical for the maintenance of the campus and not just to provide internet access or data networks.

The buildings in SCM will be LEED-certified. Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) is an internationally recognised green building certification system. To make sure the buildings comply to the LEED standards and to make sure there is total control, there will be a central unified building and campus management system. All the electronic equipment in a building will be connected to a central location which acts as the nervous system. Lighting, air-conditioning, elevators, access control, CCTV etc will be monitored and controlled from here.

Businesses can integrate their office automation with the SCM central campus management system. For example with a single access card you can enter a building’s car park, the building itself and your own office.

There will also be an integrated and centralised 24/7 access control system, including CCTV covering all the campus. The fire detection and fire fighting systems are also integrated. In case of fire all systems can talk to each other and, for example, the alarm is sounded on the public address system, specific elevators will go down to the ground floor and open, specific exits will be opened while others closed to direct people away from the hazard.

Mr Khoja pointed out that while most of these innovations have already been implemented in Dubai Internet City, Maltese contractors have been tasked with installing these systems in Ricasoli.

Besides providing the right infrastructure and making sure it’s reliable, eco-friendliness and cost savings are also an important issue.

“There are significant cost savings. Tenants just have to get into their office,” insisted SmartCity’s business development manager for ICT. “Set-up costs are greatly reduced. For example there is no need to pay for trenching and installation of internet access, data cables or telephone lines. Power, fibre, and Ethernet connections are all installed up to the doorstep. Internet Protocol (IP) will be ready installed and ready to be used for telephony, video conferencing, and unified communications. All these set-up costs will be saved and the tenants do not have to worry about them but just get into the office and get on with the work. Interconnecting tenants to the IP world will be easy so they won’t have to worry about it.”

All this will go live in October when SCM 01, the first building, is inaugurated and there’s optimism things will go smoothly.

“We studied the market requirements and benchmarked other European markets. Benefitting from our experience we believe our campus will be pretty much advanced with regards to customer requirements.”

Does this mean SmartCity has done its homework and is ready for the October inauguration?

“Of course. The first tenant just needs to do the fit-out,” concluded Mr Khoja.