21st Century calls at castle

Mar 6 2008 by Karen Dent, The Journal

ALNWICK Castle has undergone a £50,000 technology upgrade to bring its communications into the 21st Century.

Northumberland Estates, which manages more than 120,000 acres of land in Northumberland, Surrey, Middlesex and Scotland, plus tenanted farms, holiday cottages and 6,000 acres of woodland, has replaced its old telephone system with a fully integrated voice and data service.

Gateshead communications firm Executel carried out the complex installation of the system, which serves 125 telephone extensions. Spokesman Marcus Ayres said: “This was a somewhat challenging project for us due to the fact that we were working within an historic and protected environment. Conserving the original qualities of the castle was obviously of utmost importance and therefore careful planning and execution of the installation was required.”

Estate IT manager Rodney Kelly said: “It is so smooth. I thought the audio quality wouldn’t be so good, but the quality is phenomenal …

“You have to be very careful, sometimes you can’t put holes in walls or lift floorboards.

“We couldn’t put in certain types of cabling, so we had to try to use infrastructure cable that was already in place, so we’ve had to use the analogue handsets that were already in.”