Falmouth Student Accommodation

The brand new Maritime Studios were available for students to move in at the start of the 2008-09 Academic year, however there were a few well publicised teething problems that made the start - lets say - not as smooth as we had planned.

The problems thankfully are behind us now, but fell into three areas:

1. The Construction of the Steelwork for the balconies for the studios had not been finished on time.
2. There was still scaffolding around the building as the builders rushed to complete this task.
3. There were some problems of overloading inthe building's lifts.
4. The broadband connectivity to the studios struggled to meet the capacity required by the students, and there were some outages early on.

The Broadband problems occurred particularly when everyone switched on their laptops in the evening.  The buidling is served by six normal broadband lines, and what we had to do was to implement some broadband capacity limits, and for example encourage students to avoid excessively large downloads, such as movies, torrents, and file sharing that was overloading the network.

There was an article in the local paper with some students expressing concerns about the still to be completed work in the studios, which was exacerbated by the timing of our press release about the completion of the building.  As the developers and owners we naturally made an apology for the ongoing work and inconvenience, while continuing to hasten to complete and move the contractors off the site.  The end result of course is that the construction was soon finished, the broadband problems have been resolved, and we were able to move on from that phase of the building's history. 

At the time of writing the students are now in their second term in the building, settling into life in Falmouth, the roof and the grounds are growing, and of course we at Devington are learning about life as host to a community of students, as opposed to our more usual work as building developers. 

We have plans afoot to continue to improve the quality of life in the buildings, which we aim to establish as the most desirable residence for students in Falmouth.  This web site is evolving as an on-line meeting place and information resource for students, and both the building manager and caretaker are in place and working hard to look after the students at the Maritime Student Building.

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