CityFibre taps Ciena for full-fibre infrastructure backbone in UK

The new ring has been launched in collaboration with Ciena and is designed to serve 23 cities and six ‘super core’ sites as part of a multi-terabit, national backbone project to underpin its strategy of building a full-fibre digital infrastructure that will reach up to eight million premises in the country, and also fulfil its recently announced role as anchor tenant of Vodafone.

The multi-terabit, dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) network deployment carried out in partnership with leading network technology solutions vendor, Ciena.

The initial 800 Gbps wavelength will serves 23 cities and towns and connects six ‘super core’ sites in 2021, with the first ring connecting Leicester, Peterborough, Cambridge, London, Milton Keynes and Northampton. This will be followed with two further rings, providing the same enhanced core capacity between Manchester, Leeds, Leicester, Bristol, Coventry and London. With an additional 90 locations due to be added before the end of 2023, once complete, CityFibre will own and operate a high availability, fully scalable backbone, enabled by Ciena’s WaveLogic 5 Extreme programmable 800G coherent optics, 6500 Reconfigurable Line System (RLS) and Manage, Control, Plan (MCP) intelligent domain controller.

With fully diverse routing throughout, the network will connect CityFibre’s own fibre exchanges and ring-based access networks to leading third party datacentres and points of interconnect. CityFibre is confident that the full-fibre network will support “virtually unlimited” data transfer requirements for the future enabling a fully automated, cloud-based platform with open access API integration.

“A significant challenge for service providers today is securing scalable, reliable and independent national service aggregation, constrained by legacy footprints, poor SLA’s and lack of innovation. This investment will create a superior, physically diverse network alternative, whilst raising the service experience bar for our industry,” said CityFibre group chief technology officer David Tomalin. “We are already using full CDC in all our major nodes and will scale this across our entire backbone network over time. Its automation capability will enable additional rapid network restoration in the event of fibre or hardware failure, plus greater flexibility to grow capacity, balance, and re-programme our network based on the evolving needs of our customers.” Rapid TV News