Date: Thu 27th May, 2010
Venue: Bridgewater Hall, Lower Mosley Street, Manchester, M2 3WS
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There’s a lot of building work going on in Salford Quays. If you’ve missed it until now, then where have you been? Peel’s MediaCity is dominating development in an area where regeneration was once thought to be impossible.
Insider’s Moving Manchester Forward Breakfast, which attracted an audience of 100 to the Bridgewater Hall, started out with a 360-degree tour of the development – on a projector – by MediaCity head of communications Paul Newman.
He highlighted the key areas of the site – the BBC buildings, the Pie Factory, and the 220-room Holiday Inn, which is due to open in September this year. The panoramic view, he said, illustrated the scale of the development but also the intimacy in the surrounds of an existing community of Salford that has been regenerated over the past 30 years.
But the main point of the event was to see how the development, and other recent initiatives in the region, could actually make a difference and ‘move Manchester forward’. Getting right down to business, Paul Clenell, chief technology officer at Media City, said an open access broadband network would create “flexible usage across the site” and enable users to reach out internationally. “If you can get connection into MediaCity, we can connect you anywhere in the world,” he added.
Mercedes Clark-Smith from Northern Net was then quick to extol the virtues of a high-speed collaboration network developed through funding from the Northern Way. A series of access hubs across the north of England – including the North West sites of Burnley, Liverpool, Manchester, Preston and Warrington – would enable businesses to carry out high-speed file sharing and data exchange and extend the footprint of broadband access at MediaCity.
But Sue Crossley from Creative Lynx, a digital agency based in Manchester, asked how businesses in the city centre would take advantage. Clark-Smith said there was an access hub at the Cornerhouse on Oxford Road (there is also one at MediaCity) but most were looking for more – like access right across Manchester from their offices. The NWDA’s Iain Bennett said Manchester was the best place in the UK for fibre-based broadband access outside London but conceded that prices could be better.
Picking up on the efforts by Northern Net, Manchester Digital Development Agency and MediaCity to create high-speed networks for businesses, Brian Hardman from Sumners made the point that there were a lot of disparate projects at the moment and joined up thinking was needed.
Iain Bennett said there were ongoing efforts by the NWDA to come up with a framework for the future, assessing where the demand would lie both among consumers and businesses. “We don’t have the resource to cover the whole region with one project, as that would cost around £3bn. But we want to identify areas where the private sector can invest.”
Within the NWDA’s work, the Commission for the New Economy is also identifying strategic sites for developments of networks for businesses. “There won’t be an overarching solution,” said Bennett. “There will be different ones for cities and rural areas,” he added.
