October 31, 2011

EllisDon, Cisco team up to wire downtown Toronto office building

GREG MECKBACH

digital media editor

EllisDon Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) recently completed a network in a Toronto office building that handles not only the telecommunications and computer networks, but also the building automation systems, security, lighting, blinds and audio-visual displays.

PwC Tower, at 18 York Street in Toronto, was developed by Great West Life Realty Advisors with consulting and audit firm PwC as a major tenant. The firm plans to move more than 2,000 employees and occupy 16 floors in the building. PwC worked with EllisDon and Cisco to enable a variety of features such as using phones to control lighting in the rooms.

“I believe at the end of the day we have created the iPad of construction here, the basis of an intelligent building,” Stephen Foster, EllisDon’s director of information and communications technology services, said during a recent tour of the building for journalists and industry analysts.

Mary McGrath, PwC’s project leader for the PwC Tower, normally works from her home in Thornbury, about 170 kilometres northwest of Toronto. When she does work out of PwC Tower, she can reserve an office and use the desktop phone as if it’s her own. She can also use the phone to dim the lighting in the room and ensure she uses only the minimum level of lighting required. McGrath showed reporters a lunchroom that doubles as a collaboration space where employees can connect to their internal corporate networks using laptop computers or other devices with wireless cards.

“It’s a place people can go with our wireless solution if they’re sitting in their open space and they want to go have a chat, they can have their laptop or whatever they are using that day and they can sit in the oasis and have a casual meeting,” she said. “While we have shrunk our people space, we have opened up our collaboration space.”

The key technology is Internet Protocol, or IP, which has been used for decades to transfer data among computers but has since been expanded to allow voice communication and to connect building automation systems, including heating, ventilation and air conditioning.

“With the proliferation of devices that are connected to the Internet, we needed to start treating the information network as another utility,” said Rick Huijbregts, an architect and Cisco Canada’s vice-president for smart and connected communities. “We are looking at the means of pushing bits and bytes and trying to connect people to people, people to devices and machines, and machines to machines, and we see this as being very important in buildings.”

Foster showed reporters a room full of networking equipment on one of the parking levels, which acts as a demarcation point for the different telecommunications service providers connecting their cables to 18 York.

From there, the cabling goes through Catalyst 6509 switches made by Cisco and is connected to tenants through 12 strands of fibre travelling on different routes to every floor. “In traditional construction, you would have had a security riser, a lighting riser, a BAS riser,” Foster said. “All of those are gone. They’re one fibre, all separated by (virtual local-area networks) all on one fibre backbone.”

Frank Ventresca, EllisDon’s project director for PwC Tower, said that in the past the rooms for computer servers and switches were normally “just a shell space” because the tenants would not necessarily know which telephony company would provide their service.

“In this instance, we had to change our mindset and make sure the rooms were 100 per cent ready for fibre,” Ventresca said. “That helped with the tenant and the base building systems for commissioning, et cetera.”

Foster said one of the challenges in providing all the building control systems, phones and computers on to the same network was getting different companies “to play nice in the sandbox.” In the past, he said, it wasn’t easy to deal with competing lighting companies for example.

Company officials would not go into specifics on pricing but McGrath said there was a business case for outsourcing the work to Cisco and EllisDon.

“When it came down to it, there was a huge savings for us, not only on the electricity savings but on the infrastructure that we had to build, because fibre is not inexpensive,” she said.

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