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Building a Sustainable Vodafone Village

Until recently, Vodafone ’s 3000-strong, Milan-based workforce was spread across 15 different office locations in and around the business hub of the city. In order to bring this staff closer together and increase efficiency, Vodafone called for the consolidation of all these sites in to one single location

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DQC Bureau
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Until recently, Vodafone’s 3000-strong, Milan-based workforce was spread across 15 different office locations in and around the business hub of the city. In order to bring this staff closer together and increase efficiency, Vodafone called for the consolidation of all these sites in to one single location. For this new Italian headquarters, the company chose an unoccupied industrial area in the south-west of Milan, an ideal place to create the modern 67,000 square metre office complex, now known as ‘Vodafone Village’.

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This significant, sustainable and future-proof new location was inaugurated earlier this year by Italian Prime Minister, Mario Monti. The opening ceremony was attended by the CEO of Vodafone Italy and Southern Europe, Paolo Bertoluzzo, the Vodafone Group CEO, Vittorio Colao, and the Mayor of Milan.

Powering the heart of the network

Vodafone Village includes the all-important Network Operations Center, which is responsible for managing Vodafone Italy's entire network infrastructure. It is the heart of the company’s interruption-free network monitoring and Security Operations Center, which serves the country for emergency management, including national security and the coordination of public assistance requests.

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The IT infrastructure to support this significant development was the responsibility of Marco Lavia, Vodafone’s IT voice network operations manager. For the underlying physical IT network cabling he specified a future-proof cabling solution capable of supporting Vodafone’s IT systems, not only for the immediate term, but long into the future. An important condition was to deploy a network cabling system that could maximize the company’s return-on-investment. This was where Siemon came in.

Finding the answer

Established relationships between Vodafone, global cabling manufacturer Siemon and cabling installers ACLAN S.r.l. meant that Vodafone was introduced to a comprehensive portfolio of network cabling systems.

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With solid return on investment being a key decision making criteria, Siemon account manager, Stefano Barin, did not only present the product portfolio, but also introduced a detailed analysis of the total cost of ownership (TCO), in which he compared several cabling systems and their product lifecycle, based upon Vodafone’s project figures.

To Marco Lavia’s surprise the TCO calculations presented for the category 6 copper cabling system – the solution originally specified by Vodafone - did not score as well as other, higher performing systems.

Understanding total cost of ownership

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As part of the selection process, Siemon performed TCO modeling for Vodafone to demonstrate the total cost of ownership comparison for a 15,000 channel cabling system, ranging from category 5e through to category 7A/class FA.

Initial costs shown in the model include the cost of components, installation and testing. The system TCO includes the cabling and installation components at the time of original installation and costs for remediation for each cabling plant to go from 10/100 applications, to 1Gb/s, through to those requiring 10Gb/s performance. The result is divided by the years of useful life to achieve annualized costs.

Convincing case for performance

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With these results, Vodafone changed the original cabling specification from category 6 to category 7A. As Marco Lavia explained, “Considering that we wanted to deploy a solution that lasts, Siemon’s fully standards-compliant category 7A solution, TERA, with its longer estimated lifecycle, became the obvious choice to maximize our return on investment.”

Turning theory into reality

Cabling installation within Vodafone Village started with three office towers with 10, 12 and 14 floors respectively.

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With TERA, Vodafone not only eliminated the need for costly future cabling upgrades (which always translate into additional waste), it also saved on material from day one. This was due to TERA’s cable sharing capability: The fully shielded TERA cable and the non-RJ45 style quadrant connector interface, allow for one cable to deliver up to four independent 1-pair or 2-pair data or voice applications to a single work area outlet.

Green and eco-friendly campus

Siemon and Vodafone share a strong commitment to environmental protection. When approaching this project energy savings, innovation and workplace quality were all crucial elements that were to be reflected in the new complex. Subsequently, the construction of Vodafone Village followed two main guidelines: eco-sustainability and technological advancement. Some of the most impressive outcomes of this approach were the 800sqm photovoltaic garden, capable of producing over 80KW of solar energy per hour and a cogeneration system able to produce the megawatts. This energy can power large proportions of the Village.

With Vodafone Village, the mobile communications market leader has created a modern, eco-sustainable complex, supported by an IT cabling infrastructure expected to future-proofing the site for the next 20 years. Today the cabling system supports all typical data and voice applications and at the same time accommodates higher bandwidth, ready for next generation applications.

The final word goes to Marco Lavia: “We have created a modern, interactive and flexible environment, not only for our employees, but also for customers and visitors. The choice of Siemon as our network cabling partner is fully in-line with our green philosophy. Siemon’s TERA solution will support our IT applications for many years to come and we will benefit from a full system warranty that covers us for 20 years. What more could we ask for?”

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