DigiTech Centre

We have worked in close collaboration with BT to develop the DigiTech Centre, a £9.6 million research and engineering facility at BT’s Adastral Park. DigiTech is a Centre of Excellence in Digital Skills for Teaching & Learning, Research and Knowledge Exchange at the University of Suffolk

Adastral Park is BT’s global Research and Development centre and has played a pivotal role in telecommunications research, such as the commercialisation of single-mode optical fibre, and the recent development of the world’s first quantum networks.

The DigiTech Centre is now fully open and is providing cutting-edge digital skills for people looking to pursue careers in information and communications technology, and has received the blessing of Her Royal Highness, Princess Anne. Specialist high tech laboratories are at the heart of DigiTech, and are being used jointly by University staff, students and businesses at Adastral Park and across the region.

DigiTech is now the principal home for undergraduate, apprenticeship and postgraduate computing provision at the University of Suffolk. Our students have access to a secure Cyber Range, an enterprise-grade Juniper networking sandpit, and an AI Compute Server delivering 9.7 64-bit double precision teraflops of computational resources, among other facilities.

In research and knowledge exchange, the DigiTech Centre is the physical location of the Digital Futures Institute. We are undertaking extensive research and business collaborations in Artificial Intelligence, automation, cybersecurity, Internet of Things, networks, serious games, robotics and software, with PhD student and postdoctoral projects already being based at the centre. The Smart House is now the lynchpin for the work of the Suffolk Sustainability Institute, in particular our research into “net zero” operations and our commitment as a university in this area.

The DigiTech Centre is a unique partnership uniting our young, and modern University with a world leading telecommunications company in BT. In a rapidly developing technological age, the DigiTech Centre is a state of the art ‘solution centre’ for SMEs and other businesses as well as a research and knowledge transfer hub. The Centre has world-class co-working specialist laboratories and will make Suffolk a recognised destination for industry-focused ICT and Digital Creative study programmes and an internationally recognised destination for continuous professional development in digital technologies.