Friday 17th Oct. 2025 saw 63 of us meet up at the community centre in Harlow.
Much catching up with old colleagues from the labs interrupted by trips to the bar and a nice buffet meal.
Ian Vance kept us on track during the evening, and this year we were glad to welcome an after dinner speaker – Richard Collar – Tec. Director at Kao Data Park.
Richard gave a talk and took questions on the data centre being built on the London Road site, its prodigious power requirement. The surprise to me is data centres are no longer sold or differentiated by bandwidth available – that’s now a given – Data centre design and marketing is dominated by power density – distributing MW of power into a building and carrying away MW of heat from the building.
Richard gave a tantalising mention of the deployment of hollow fibre between site – maybe a talk for another year?
We ran a successful raffle collecting funds to ensure we can run another year.
Ian wrapped up the evening by thanking Richard for the talk – glad that the London Road site is benefiting from the work carried out there all those years ago.
Thanks were given to Mike for organising the raffle and to Gordon, Lynda, Roy, Alan and James for all the work behind the scenes.
Some pictures taken on the evening.