Colt gallops to bring high-capacity bandwidth to UK’s major cities

Barely a week after it announced it had undertaken what it calls a significant network expansion programme set to bring high capacity 100Gbps and 10Gbps services to businesses across the UK and facilitate 5G roll-outs, UK connectivity provider SSE Enterprise Telecoms has been selected by global network and voice services provider Colt Technology Services to deploy two 100Gbps Network-to-Network Interfaces (NNIs) across its UK network.

Despite the Covid-19 outbreak which has curtailed home installations since March, the UK has been ramping up the availability of ultra-fast broadband across the country.

Recent research from Ofcom confirmed that the availability of full-fibre broadband in the UK continues to improve rapidly, with more than 14% of homes now able to access faster, more reliable full-fibre services – an increase of 670,000 (two percentage points) since January 2020.

However, to date, rolling out gigabit-capable broadband to all parts of the country has been challenging, and a programme to accelerate the extension of the fibre infrastructure to hard-to-reach locations was initiated by BT broadband provision division Openreach in January 2020. In addition, the UK’s altnet community has stepped up and has made strong contribution to the roll-out.

Telco challengers Colt and SSE Enterprise Telecoms aim to support this further by enabling greater access to high bandwidth services, with the latter currently embarking on a significant expansion programme to significantly grow its network reach. As part of the deal, UK cities including London and Manchester will be able to access multiple high-bandwidth 10Gbps Ethernet services as a direct result of the deployment.

The NNIs will offer a high bandwidth single point of access into the SSE Enterprise Telecoms Ethernet footprint and can act as an accelerator in enabling access to high-capacity connectivity services. SSE Enterprise Telecoms is claimed to be one of the only UK telcos to offer pervasive 100Gbps NNIs via its price comparison tool, Livequote and Colt is one of the first partners to take advantage with customer circuits already deployed and delivered over the two NNIs.

SSE currently operates a UK-wide network with more than 20,000 km of connectivity and the network expansion is designed to see over 550 exchanges unbundled, with up to 100Gbps capacity. This investment will help further enable SSE Enterprise Telecoms and its partners to facilitate 10Gbps Ethernet across the country.

A core requirement for Colt in choosing its high-capacity network partner was that it needed to have what it said was the same “relentless focus” on “excellent standards”, customer-centric services and speed of delivery. SSE Enterprise Telecoms, which has a long-standing relationship with Colt, and the new deal is said to take the partnership to the next level, helping provide Colt’s customers across the UK with access to the high capacity connectivity services they require.

“Our customers choose Colt based on our net proposition, quality of service and very high service level agreement (SLA) standards,” said Douglas May, manager of carrier relations for Western Europe, the US and Canada at Colt Technology Services.

“We needed a high-capacity network partner that would mirror our values and SSE Enterprise Telecoms was the obvious choice. The business is in a perfect place to support us in delivering exceptional high capacity services that will help support our customers grow and future-proof the wider UK digital economy.”