Broadcasting House, Salford Quays & TVC

Before the BBC English regions (and some nations) moved toward "Hubs" (which are effectively news rouing and intake/playout operations) most had "CTA"s (Central Technical Areas) which were the engineering areas of the building (containing racks of equipment) where the engineers were based who did both maintenance and routing of incoming and outgoing lines.

Thanks guy for the responses. Figured it was worth a shot.

To be honest, modern equipment rooms are very dull. Most the kit is either off the shelf a broadcast gear which is normally just cards in boxes, or its standard IT stuff.

The days when a an apps room like CAR would have unique specialist equipment designed and built in house are long gone

There were a few BBC regions that had Comms Centres rather than MCR or CTA. Pebble Mill was one, Cardiff another.
LBH had London Control Room (LCR) that for a while was renamed Engineering Operations Centre (EOC), a name that was never liked as you then had to explain that the room was basically the London Control Room.....

The actual operational part was on the first floor, with two important apparatus rooms next to it, and then another seven apps rooms elsewhere in the building - usually down in the lower ground or basement floors. These were unmanned, and cold and noisy.
Eight of the apps rooms were works of art, beautifully constructed. The ninth was the IT one in my day. Computers balanced on sagging plywood shelves and cables everywhere.

That sounds about right for an IT installation. We showed an IT person the back of a few bays of telly kit one day and he was absolutely amazed at the tidiness of it. They just don't seem to get that a tidy installation is a great help in a problem solving situation.

About right for an IT installation by a bunch of amateurs at a non-IT specialist company, maybe.

I currently work for a datacentre provider. I don't recognise the description at all.

I concur, I work for a large IT services organisation at the moment, and none of our installs are like this.

I have previously been at both public sector, and medium business support, and neither fit this description.

In my opinion, this seems like cheap IT contractors doing the work on the companies behalf.

The IT installations I had seen were about 20 years ago. Most of the kit wasn't designed to be mounted in bays, and it lead to everything having a temporary feel to it.

I agree that the bigger installations now can look so much better - now there is so much more of it, it has to be!

I refer back about 5 years ago, I hope things have changed for the better in this respect in the intervening period.

For every good IT installation there's probably 1000 really bad ones. I've seen some lovely IT racks, well on par with broadcast racks. I've equally seen some which should be fired into the sun, along with their creators.

That said, I think the "big" side of IT had more in common with telecoms, bringing the idea of today installations with it. The cheap side is the realm of household electricians, who've probably never seen the quantity of cable you can get into a 42U rack in their lives, let alone contemplated terminating it.

In which case I refer back to the 'bunch of amateurs' comment.

I don't work in that section but I know that our DC guys are absolutely anal about putting gear in correctly. Everything is correct, neat and properly installed, and all cabling is documented. They won't put anything in until we've completed design documentation and accounted for everything.

I've seen some very poor IT wiring standards, seems to derive from the network 'flood wiring' philosophy. Broadcast wiring standards derive from very tight legacy of GPO/BBC/MOD. You can't afford to have sloppy wiring practice in the broadcast world, so IT standards have been raised ( mostly by being adopted by 'broadcast ')