NorthernNet opens for business in the North East

Feb 25 2010 by Karen Dent, The Journal

A super-fast broadband network and the latest technology located at pay-as-you go hubs around the region is aiming to put Northern creative businesses on the map. Karen Dent reports.

A HIGH-speed secure broadband network and hubs equipped with some of the technology used in box-office hit Avatar has opened for business in the North East.

Although officially operating since last December – “a dreadful month” to launch anything, according to the project’s director Mercedes Clark-Smith – the £15m NorthernNet is now setting out its stall to creative companies around the region.

The project, which is backed by the Northern Way initiative and funded by One North East and its two counterparts in the North West and Yorkshire, provides warp-speed broadband and top-of-the-range technology at 14 pay-as-you-go Media Access Bureaus (MABs) across the North of England.

In the region, there are four MABs at Boho One in Middlesbrough, the North East Business & Innovation Centre (BIC) in Sunderland and two in Newcastle at the Tyneside Cinema and Northern Film & Media, which can be hired for £60 an hour.

“You’ve got these Media Access Bureaus, they have industry standard kit in them like Avid and the kind of media to pull in big files and send them out everywhere,” says Ms Clark-Smith, NorthernNet’s project director (innovation and collaboration).

“At the heart, it is a high-speed secure system that is 100MB a second. You could send a 1GB file in under two minutes.

“There are services in the network like Asperta, which is a really fast file-sending system as well as super-fast broadband.

“James Cameron used Asperta when he was making Avatar, pretty much in every other frame. That’s the quality and power of that service. Fundamentally, that’s what it’s there for, sending really huge data files.

“One of the misconceptions is that it’s closed and that you can’t send anything out of the North, but you can send files to any email in the world.”

The concept for NorthernNet has been distilling for a number of years. The original idea came from Mark Elliott, CEO at Digital City Business in Middlesbrough.

“It was off the back of a comment made by an editor at a One North East meeting almost four years ago,” he says.

“I and Mark Dobson at the Tyneside Cinema got together and wrote a proposition document that we thought had disappeared into the ether but One North East were taking it along and developing it.

“RDAs (regional development agencies) get criticised a lot but this is a case where the RDAs have embraced a vision and gone for it.

“It’s easy to criticise but this is one where they have run with something that is really quite visionary.”