By Lilia Guan www.crn.com.au
Fibre optics specialists help wire Dubai’s Burj Khalifa Tower.
A small business in Melbourne has touted its role in the rollout of an optical fibre network built for the world’s tallest tower, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa Tower.
Australian-owned Warren and Brown Technologies (WBT) provided equipment and training to Bond Communications – the company in Dubai commissioned to provide the complete audio-visual solutions for the 828 metre-high tower.
Part of Bond’s brief was to wire up 50,000 fibre optic cables to service the building’s telecommunications, security and other needs.
Bill Kotsakidis, business development manager told CRN that while WBT didn’t wire the tower up, it provided all the ducting for the fibre optics used in the building.
“Bond became aware of WBT through our contract solutions with Telstra, over the years,” he said.
Kotsakidis said WBT also supplied a machine which helped Bond’s workers polish 16 connectors at a time, instead of employees polishing them one at-a-time by hand.
“We created all the modules for a portable polishing machine to clean the connectors on site,” he said. “When connectors are cleaned properly you don’t have excess links and cleaning 50,000 connectors by hand would’ve created poor quality work and would’ve been time consuming.”
WBT was also instrumental in training Bonds workers on working with Fibre Optics, said Kotsakidis.
“[A lot] of its workers were from India, Pakistan and some locals – who had no knowledge of working the fibre optics,” he said. “We created six learning modules which took them back to the basics, including safety issues surrounding the use of the technology.”
According to Kotsakidis, WBT has been providing products to Middle Eastern-based companies for the past eight years and was “proud to have been part of one of the world’s greatest structures”.
WBT opened for business in 1921 and is headquartered in Maidstone, Victoria.
