Dark Fibre
Dark Fibre gives you maximum control and flexibility over your network, allowing your network to scale-up as your bandwidth requirements grow.
Are you looking to build a network to support bandwidth-intensive business applications? Creating your own backhaul network? Looking for carrier agnostic connections to your Data Centre? Our Dark Fibre solution could be the answer - with the ability to support >100Gb bandwidths providing virtually limitless capacity.
Our extensive partner network gives us access to more than 50,000 km of existing network, and the ability to deliver new connectivity where a business case exists.
One example of the benefits of dark fibre connectivity is Goonhilly Earth Station in Cornwall.
Goonhilly Earth Station
Goonhilly is one of the most recognised names in the Space Industry. It was at one time the largest satellite earth station in the world. It’s famous throughout the world for being one of three earth stations involved in the first trans-Atlantic TV transmission (via Telstar) in 1962. It was present at the birth of Intelsat, Eutelsat and Inmarsat as well as the birth of the Internet as networks on the East and West coasts of USA were linked to Europe. The site also links into undersea cable lines.
To take advantage of its unique position, Goonhilly has recently opened an on-site Data Centre facility providing both colocation facilities and access to advanced compute power for Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) services.
Providing on-site capability enables the enormous volumes of data to be processed and reduced, but there is still a requirement to then move that data to where it can be best used. For this Clear in conjunction with Next Connex and our delivery partners provided dual diverse Dark Fibre connections from the facility in Cornwall to two of the main Data Centre facilities in London. These provide onward connection to almost 500 separate carrier networks.
The solution provides Goonhilly with the ability to offer its data hungry clients resilient connections to any network or destination with no restriction on the bandwidth offered. It also provides their clients with the ability onboard rapidly as there is little or no lead time when providing a new client with connectivity, as it is already there and available for allocation. This has proved particularly useful during the Covid-19 lockdown when network providers were unable to deliver new circuits. For Goonhilly this was not a problem as the circuits already existed, and so they were able to continue to on board new clients with no restrictions.
Our dark fibre solution enables us to respond rapidly to meet our clients needs for bandwidth and resilience. It reduces lead times and minimises costs, making Goonhilly an even more attractive proposition.
Chris Roberts - Head of Datacentre & Cloud