fulham football club

fibre optic and structured cabling

We have been installing fibre optic and structured cabling on behalf of FFC for several years, mostly at their main Craven Cottage stadium, but also in significant quantities at their Motspur Park training facility and their academy at Chessington.

Our first involvement back in 2005 at Craven Cottage was to install a network of multi-mode fibre optic backbones to a dozen new cabinets, strategically located around the stadium, with the subsequent need to also install many additional structured outlets throughout the site (both at that same time and in the following years) for telephony, data, EPOS, WiFi and CCTV purposes. It must be said that many of the main cabling routes (as is surely the case in any football stadium) are particularly long and found mostly in potentially hazardous environments, such as low undercrofts beneath the seating areas, coupled with a great deal of high-level working through the rear of the stands, with other routes being typically via underground ducts and overhead gantries.

With parts of the Craven Cottage stadium being on the National Heritage List for England (NHLE), the everyday challenges are compounded by the need to also observe and comply with specific regulations for undertaking cabling in such listed buildings.

in more recent years, in addition to a steady requirement for new outlets at all three FFC locations, we have been invited to supply and install new fibre optic cabling for a variety of purposes, as follows:

To achieve a much-needed degree of resilience across the stadium, the original multi-mode network we installed back in 2005 was replaced in 2017 by two new, diversely routed, single-mode networks – a ‘primary’ network, routed anti-clockwise around the stadium from Server Core 1 in the Johnny Haynes Stand and a ‘secondary’ network, routed clockwise from Server Core 2 in the Craven Cottage.
To operate new electronic scoreboards, one at each end of the ground, we installed multi-mode fibre optic cables from the cabinet within the DJ Booth in the Riverside Stand.
To better manage any anti-social behaviour amongst the crowd and increase the possibility of successfully identifying the instigators of such incidents, we installed another multi-mode fibre optic cable from the Riverside Primary cabinet to a ‘Panamera’ camera at high-level in the Hammersmith End Stand.
To enable the coaching staff to obtain better post-match information, we installed a single-mode fibre optic from Server Core 2 in the Craven Cottage to a ‘match analysis’ camera in the gantry which overlooks the half-way line from high up in the Riverside Stand.
Apart from the ongoing need for additional structured outlets, notable activity at the Motspur Park training facility has included new fibre optic backbones around the site and the structured cabling (mostly for WiFi and CCTV) within the new training dome.

one final note...

It is also worth adding one final note concerning Craven Cottage specifically: As a football ground, it becomes a hive of activity every year during the closed season! Much project work can be pre-planned in advance but cannot commence until the current season finishes each year, at which point it becomes imperative to provide adequate management and resource to successfully complete the scheduled work before the new season begins. Given the club’s promotion to the Premier League at the end of the 2017/18 season, this was particularly significant in the summer of 2018, during which months a whole host of additional IT cabling was needed, largely prompted by safety requirements.