Coal Drops Yard is a new shopping experience in the heart of King’s Cross, London.

The £100m project involved converting the listed Victorian sheds into a high-end shopping complex, comprising of 100,00 square feet of restaurants, shops, cafes and bars.

Able were awarded the contract to install the data and network infrastructure. By the nature of the scheme, this had to be a highly resilient system with multiple levels of redundancy.

The structured cabling system was based on an Excel Cat6 system. The multiple Comms Rooms were interconnected via diversely routed OM4 fibre.

Being a historical and complex site, installing many of the links proved highly challenging, involving devising complex cable routes and multiple ‘visits’ to the same cables.

The focus of the network design was to build a robust and highly reliable system.

• The Edge employs Cisco 2960 PoE+ switches with redundant power and using UPS’s.
• The Core employs dual redundant Cisco Catalyst 2960 chassis switches, each with dual supervisor engines. Both chassis are connected to every edge switch via fibre links.
• Connectivity to the outside world is via dual redundant Cisco routers and Internet links.

Able partitioned the network into multiple VLAN’s to support the different services, including configuring of multicast.

Able carried out comprehensive acceptance tests to check continued operation in the event of faults.