By Miles Griffiths, BSc Business and Management Studies

After ten days in Malaysia, I was now accustomed to the nation’s spicy food. Over at the office, we were placed in the coverage department, which I was unfamiliar with. We were tasked with finding a suitable area for TIME to lay down network cables around high rise buildings. My group was challenged by researching the area of Seremban.

Initially, I was concerned we would not complete this extensive task within such a tight deadline of one day, as we had limited knowledge on the tasks we were completing as well as the multiple calculations we had to make.

Our first step was opening up Google maps in order to search our given area for high rise buildings. Although we initially found this difficult, it became more satisfying after we finally found a high quality building with a large quantity of units, as this was the ideal type of high rise building TIME was looking for.

At lunch I decided to eat at the canteen for a change, which was nice because they had a wide selection of food in a buffet style, where I was able to able to eat a lot of food for only 7Rm (the equivalent of about £1.50).

In the afternoon our group focused on filling out a table of information about the high rise buildings we had found earlier in the day, such as whether the building was greenfield or brownfield, the coordinates and how many blocks, floors and units the buildings had. We needed to complete this task quickly as this information was going to be used in a further table based on the cost analysis to decide whether TIME should use that area. We found the area of Seremban to be too costly as the buildings were too far from each other.

The next day (26 June), our work was far more challenging and intense than what we had experienced previously as we focused on creating a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) and a cost analysis of our business case. A MAN is used to show the route of the fibre optic cable. In the afternoon we presented our business cases to Jimmy, who decided whether or not Time could use what we had researched.