B. Amsterdam - Europe's biggest start-up hub

B. Amsterdam initially started in 2014 as project to revive the IBM's old typewriter factory that had been vacant for over 10 years. Not the conventional way of renting out square meters was used, they started to build a community or an ecosystem of entrepreneurs and talent in an environment where business, work, meeting, partying and sports come together. It became a great success and after opening B.2 in 2016 and B.3 in 2017 the project now consists of 40,000m2 of offices, (co-)workplaces and events. An additional 24,000m2 of smart city hub is available for logistics and urban farming.

B. Amsterdam reached out to Zerospace in 2015 for help in professionalizing the data communication facilities for their tenants. At the time, they experienced numerous service interruptions on the Ziggo (UPC) internet connection and the consumer grade network equipment and architecture was no longer able to handle to rapidly increasing number of tenants/ users. Zerospace designed a complete new and modern network architecture based on centralised control of active components (both fixed and wireless network components) out of a nearby Tier III datacenter. The link between the datacenter and B.1 was initially realised with a third party dark fibre, but later replaced by Zerospace's own multi-redundant fibre optic infrastructure. This infrastructure was later expanded to include the locations B.2 and B.3.

Commissioned by B. Amsterdam, Zerospace has designed and built all of the vertical cabling systems at the different locations part of the campus. Due to its turn-key status, for B.2 also the horizontal cabling system was designed and built by Zerospace, including all network enclosures, labelling and certification.

Also the entire active network infrastructure was designed and delivered by Zerospace, on behalf of B. Amsterdam. Including all switches and wireless access points, currently 32 switches and 145 access points. The centralised control of pre-provisionsed tenant networks (255 office, 400 co-work, 60 corporate), sporting both wired access and unified wireless access, is primarily performed out of Zerospace’s position in Global Switch Amsterdam datacenter. To this end, Zerospace has built flexible Routing as a Service instances, managed by a high-availability Kubernetes cluster running multiple applications, among which Elastic stack, Virtual SmartZone, Radius and customer portals.

In this particular case, daily radio spectrum analyses and adjustments are essential to provide enough bandwidth and airtime to the exceptional high number of end-user devices. This is especially challenging because the B. Amsterdam campus is located near Schiphol airport and their use for air traffic communications (e.g. radar) limits the number of available radio channels for free-to-air WiFi even further.

Our mission: Together with B. Amsterdam, connect the minds that build the future.