Flinders University’s City Campus is the first of its kind in South Australia. Situated in Adelaide’s One Festival Tower, this vertical campus features all services and facilities over 8 levels within a single state-of-the-art building, fostering collaboration and empowering learning opportunities.
“The presence at One Festival Tower was a game-changer in terms of the Flinders University prominence in the centre of Adelaide. We had outgrown our previous presence on the corner of Victoria Square and Flinders Street which included a lobby and five floors of a much smaller size,” says Jarrod Sayers, Senior IDS Network Services Specialist.
Cutting-edge technology informs every part of the campus offering flexible learning experiences. With access-all-areas WIFI, areas to connect individual students’ devices, and classrooms equipped with technology, this enables hybrid and remote learning. This level of connection requires a reliable and fast internet connection as well as a bespoke solution. “We knew we would need high-speed and redundant connectivity into the City Campus and by leveraging our existing relationship with SABRENet we were able to do so without fuss,” says Jarrod.
The planning process for their involvement in the Flinders’ City Campus project began around 2020. At that time they were already a long-term customer of SABRENet, utilising the dark fibre services to seamlessly connect a number of metropolitan campuses to the Flinders University network without the added complications of third-party carrier equipment.
“Aside from the ease of provisioning services, the availability and support we receive from the SABRENet team, utilising dark-fibre services enables Flinders University to effortlessly upgrade or change a sites network connectivity to better serve our students. We have also been able to seamlessly upgrade a number of sites from 10G to 40G or 100G without any interruption of service,” says Jarrod.
Flinders University City Campus features an innovative, collaborative learning model, providing real world experience, affording students the opportunity to work with real businesses. As a vibrant and connected cultural hub, students study alongside and connect with key arts, business, government, sports, health and tech organisations. The innovative partnerships extends to the relationship with SABRENet. Jarrod says,“Having worked with SABRENet since its inception, I have always found them to be professional, accommodating and provide services which are cost-effective and simple to activate and manage. Their local teams understand the higher education sector and the challenges and timing pressures we face.”
A requisite to support Finders University’s state-of-the-art facilities is speed and latency; extremely important to the students to enable efficient data access from Flinders’ internal systems or the Internet. “This allows the students to spend less time waiting and more time doing,” says Jarrod. “The increased network speeds we have been able to achieve between sites also enables researchers to collaborate and share data much quicker.”
Flinders University also operates a number of data centres and uses SABRENet services to provide high-throughput and low-latency connectivity to its metropolitan campuses and remote sites, and also to the Internet.
Flinders University’s Factory of the Future, is currently being constructed at Tonsley Innovation District and will bring innovation, Industry 4.0 technologies, research and training together to advance manufacturing and strengthen the nation’s economy. This new building will be connected via SABRENet. Jarrod says, ”SABRENet dark-fibre connections have become the defacto standard for Flinders University when connecting metropolitan campuses.”
