It's been quite a while now since I started working on BBC R&D's North Lab. I've thoroughly failed to provide any updates, for which I apologise, but I think it falls under the category of "the more is happening, the less time you have to blog about it"! We've been ploughing ahead with our interim lab which will tide us over for the next two years or so on the existing BBC Manchester site, and planning for MediaCity:UK at Salford, which is our longer-term solution. My main focus was to be the former, but I've increasingly been pulled in to helping plan for MCUK; as you can probably imagine, it's a very large project requiring a lot of effort. But perhaps we're starting to work out just what it takes to build an R&D lab...

One senior R&D figure described the basic requirements as basically an empty box with a fat Internet pipe. To an extent, he could well be right. Within that box we need to put some specialist facilities - a listening room of some sort, a lab area including soldering space, a viewing room for large displays, to name a few - but what more do we really need? Well, like anything, it's not quite that simple. Our equipment racks have massive power requirements, and that leads to extensive cooling. In our interim lab we're not looking at too much, but in Salford we need to be ready to handle an IPTV future, whatever that looks like. It will certainly involve that fat Internet pipe, and probably a lot of servers, routers and other gear. How much gear? Well, who knows. If peer to peer distribution takes off, then maybe less servers will be required than todays iPlayer and other systems. But then isn't the hot buzz right now all around cloud computing? And that means more datacentres than ever.

Our fat pipe isn't just for the Internet of course. As a research department, we're working collaboratively both with our southern lab in London and with academic institutions and industrial partners. So we need to be connected to the universities via the JANET network, and have our own dedicated bandwidth between R&D sites. That bandwidth will carry IP traffic (computer networks) of course, but also possibly video and audio at very high bit rates. All that means one thing: fibre. And here's the tricky thing: that fibre, that fat pipe, is one of the single biggest costs we face. Fitting acoustically treated spaces like listening rooms into an office style building is the other big one, and that's a whole different headache.

But it's not just about talking to the outside world that we need to think about. How do we get signals between engineers' desks, laboratories and server & apparatus rooms? We've been doing a lot of work on the types of cabling we need to install, balancing cost and complexity against flexibility. We need to send audio, video, radio frequency (or RF, which includes off-air feeds from satellite, freeview and more, not just radio!) around the place as well as data. We'd like anyone to be able to do any type of work in any area of the lab too, but if we install lots of video, lots of audio, lots of RF, lots of data and some fibre to every desk, we end up with an immense amount of cabling which we can neither afford nor practically manage. So how do we create flexibility while remaining realistic? We're pinning a lot of hopes on putting audio and video signals over Cat7 (next generation network cabling) and/or fibre, but the fact remains that we'll be having some dedicated video and RF cabling because sometimes we simply need to test things based around industry standard connections.

We're getting there. I'm still hoping we'll have the interim lab up and running within 3 months or less, and my colleague Michael and I are pushing ahead with that as fast as we can. And MediaCity, whilst further off, is hitting us with deadline after deadline, as the buildings are up and fit-out will shortly begin. BBC R&D will be unrecognisable in 5 years, and I think it'll be better than ever.

I’m an engineer with the BBC and sharing information about my work, but this is my personal website.