The Problem

In December 2023, Chanel was preparing their Métiers d'Art show in Manchester — the brand's first fashion show in England in over a decade. They shut down Thomas Street in the Northern Quarter and built a 115-metre glass runway. Peter Saville designed the poster. The global fashion press flew in.

Behind the scenes, somebody needed to make the internet work.

OneTek already had fibre running through Thomas Street — part of a network built to serve the Northern Quarter after the success of the GleeFi deployment in Manchester's Gay Village. The Northern Quarter fibre originated from the Manchester Buddhist Centre project and had been extended to serve businesses along Thomas Street and the surrounding area. When the construction team arrived to build the glass canopy, one of those cables was in the way.

OneTek moved it. That was supposed to be the end of it.

But the production team got talking to the OneTek engineers on site. Chanel needed serious connectivity — fast broadband for their production offices, reliable Wi-Fi across the entire street for staff and guests, and a separate high-speed setup at the Midland Hotel where the media team would be processing content around the clock.

Could OneTek do all of that? And could they do it by Monday?

The Solution

The solution was designed on the Friday. By Monday, it was live.

Across Thomas Street, OneTek deployed fibre broadband, networking for Chanel's temporary offices, and Wi-Fi coverage for staff and guests across the whole area. Around 40 access points and dozens of network switches went in over the weekend.

The Midland Hotel was the bigger challenge. Chanel's media team needed a multi-gigabit internet connection on a dedicated floor — fast enough to handle the volume of photo and video content coming out of the show in real time. That meant replacing the internal network on an entire floor of the hotel, installing switching infrastructure, and providing full Wi-Fi coverage for the Chanel team.

OneTek set up a point-to-point multi-gigabit microwave link between the roof of Manchester's Central Library — directly across the street from the Midland — and the hotel roof. Getting the fibre from the roof down to the comms room on the ground floor was the interesting part. There wasn't time for conventional cable routing. So OneTek brought in an abseiler, who dropped down from the hotel roof and ran the fibre cable externally, getting it into the comms room in a single morning.

The End Result

When everything was live, the Chanel team had Wi-Fi speeds exceeding 550 Mbps across their working spaces — more than enough to push high-resolution content to Paris in real time.

The show itself lasted about an hour. Thousands of hours of global media coverage came out of it. Every photo, every video, every live update from inside that glass canopy and from the Midland Hotel went out over OneTek's network.

The event made headlines in Vogue, Grazia, V Magazine, and dozens of other outlets. It was covered as a cultural moment for Manchester — Chanel connecting their haute couture heritage to the city's industrial and musical history.

None of the coverage mentioned the internet connection. That's usually how you know it worked.

The Future

This project didn't come from a pitch deck or a sales call. It came from being on the ground, having infrastructure already in place, and being willing to say yes to something that needed doing in days rather than months.

OneTek could do it because the fibre was already there. The Northern Quarter network — built off the back of the Buddhist Centre project and the GleeFi success in the Gay Village — meant OneTek had infrastructure and relationships in central Manchester that no other provider could match at short notice.

It's also a good example of what happens when one company handles the whole thing. The Thomas Street Wi-Fi, the Midland Hotel network rebuild, the point-to-point link from the library, the internal switching — all designed and managed by one team. No gaps, no handoffs, no waiting for a third party to turn up.

Designed on a Friday. Live on Monday. For a client that doesn't accept anything less than perfect.