Canterbury Christ Church University’s Building 2 project has seen the city campus transformed with a stunning new building featuring state-of-the-art facilities.

The £65 million building brings together engineers, scientists, doctors and healthcare students in an inspirational learning environment, with industry-standard, high-tech facilities on each of its three floors. It provides space for research, experimentation, industry collaboration and so much more. 

PROJECT BRIEF 

Strive AV’s project brief was to implement an AV system employing the latest technologies to facilitate a new style of classroom learning. 

Strive AV’s design implementation of a new to market AV over IP system to sit on CCCU’s existing network won approval from the client with project award in August 2020. 

This design negated the need in most spaces for traditional video switching and allowed teaching spaces to be joined together with ease, transmitting video, audio, control and USB to other classrooms, and potentially other buildings, from a single teaching space. 

PROJECT CHALLENGES 

Strive AV’s in-house infrastructure teams in conjunction with the technical project manager and systems integration team worked with the client to advise on the network infrastructure required for an AV over IP system. 

However, the first challenge upon arriving on site was that the network cable schematics deployed by the project management team at Canterbury Christ Church University wasn’t followed by the contractor, leaving all floor connection points fed from different network switch stacks to the wall connection points in any given room. With this implementation, it would leave all multicast streams traversing the core, threatening a level of network degradation (due to required bandwidth) unacceptable by the university. With the aid of the university’s and Strive AV’s infrastructure teams, a design was implemented to create a multi-floor sister stack to combat this issue.

PROJECT OUTCOMES 

CCCU’s new building opened in January 2021 and has already proved a valuable addition to the university estate. AV over IP technology has enabled Canterbury Christ Church University to maintain social distancing by using multiple classrooms to teach a single class of students, helping the university to continue delivering high-quality teaching and learning experiences, despite the challenges faced.