Equinix MA1 / Telecity Williams & Kilburn House Manchester

Colo-X analysis

Equinix MA1, formerly Telecity Williams and Kilburn House is the most important UK network node outside of London. Equinix acquired Telecity in Q4 2015. This is only a small site offering around 15,000 sq ft of net technical capacity at a standard 5Amps/1kW per rack due to the age of the facility. But because of its age its place as the best connected data centre in Manchester is assured.

Today this is evidenced by the fact that 84 out of just over 100 LINX ports in use in Manchester are located in Williams House.

This facility is therefore ideal for carriers/network operators wanting to interconnect with each other but enterprise/content users should consider other Manchester locations where power density is more suitable, or indeed colocation buyers not needing ecosystem access should also look at alternatives.

Equinix MA1 facility description

Equinix MA1 was originally opened by Mike Kelly, founder of Telecity, who had worked in the computing department at the nearby University of Manchester. The university had actually established a commercial arm known as IFL – Internet Facilitators Ltd who offered space data centre capacity to third parties in their own IT suite before they eventually opened a dedicated facility in Reynolds House, which is now known as Equinix MA2.

Williams House and the adjacent Kilburn House are converted office buildings and only offer 18,000 sq ft of gross capacity at a low average power density of just 1kw per cabinet or 500W per metre, which simply reflects the age of the facility.

The huge benefit though of its early start, the first colocation facility in the UK outside of London, is that every carrier and network building out across the UK at the height of the “telecoms boom” in the late ’90s went into Williams House, ensuring like its forebear Telehouse North in London Docklands, its position as a leading network node and strategically, from a network resilience point of view, one of the few independent of London Docklands.

Technical stats