BT BOOSTS ETHERNET CONNECTIVITY ACROSS UK DATA CENTRES

BT has launched an additional three new data centre PoP (Point of Presence) sites in data centres across the UK, as the company continues to invest in its Ethernet fibre footprint.

The sites in Manchester, Leeds and Slough are designed to make it easier for BT’s wholesale customers to make Ethernet connections into BT’s core network quickly and at a lower cost by bringing the network physically closer to them.

By investing in new equipment, housed in data centres across the UK, BT Wholesale will be able to substantially reduce the connection and rental costs for customers, as well as speeding up the time it takes to interconnect with its network.

Paul Beacham, General Manager, TDM Data, Ethernet & Optical Product Management at BT Wholesale said: “This is part of a wide investment in BT’s Ethernet footprint across the UK, and it comes at a time when the cloud and hosted communications services market continues to grow rapidly.

“We believe the huge benefits of the cloud can only be achieved if hosted services are run over reliable, high capacity fibre network connectivity, which is delivered flawlessly. These services are being adopted in increasing numbers by businesses of all sizes, so BT is investing in more network options to support that growth in demand. We want to be in the right locations and at the right price for our customers in order to support, satisfy and stimulate the growth of UK plc.”

BT Wholesale’s data centre PoP rollout began earlier this year, and the specific sites to go live this month include; TelecityGroup in Joule House, Manchester,and Equinix (LDN5) in Slough and a further one in Leeds.

The footprint already includes Telehouse Europe North and the Global Switch1 data centre in London, as well as one of the UK’s largest data centres in Newport, South Wales.

The service offers three major benefits to customers wishing to connect at any of these locations:

• Resilience. The inherent resilience of BT’s Ethernet backhaul network has been extended to data centre locations, providing fully resilient fibre routes and automatic traffic switching.
• Speed of provision. The standard provision lead times for 1G ports in these locations are just 10 working days. This can offer significant reductions in lead times, some five or six times quicker than buying standard direct access products
• Lower costs. Up to 75% cheaper than traditional access using direct network access products.

BT plans to launch further data centre PoP locations during 2014 as well as supporting higher bandwidths with 10Gbit/s ports available in key locations. Next year BT will be extending its next generation optical network into a number of data centre locations supporting national connectivity at 10Gbit/s, 40Gbit/s and 100Gbit/s bandwidths.