Fluidata Boosts Capacity of its Broadband ISP Solution for UK Rural Areas

Business ISP Fluidata has invested a further £2.5 million to massively boost the capacity of its new Service Exchange Platform (SEP), which makes it easier for a range of competitive broadband ISPs (i.e. not just BT based providers) to reach rural homes and businesses through a specially aggregated open access wholesale network.

The aggregation of multiple last mile rural networks into Fluidata’s existing carrier independent wholesale platform effectively allows related ISPs to provide access via any of the potentially hundreds of disparate networks across the UK, which helps bring competition into areas that might previously have been the domain of a single operator.

Demand for SEP and generally rising levels of data consumption mean that Fluidata must be able to cater for the expected growth in 1Gbps (Gigabits per second) and 10Gbps services over the next few years, and to support 100Gbps services in the future. As a result the ISP has announced a huge new investment to “dramatically increase [their] core network capacity – essential in dealing with this demand and a growing number of fibre technologies.”

Piers Daniell, MD of Fluidata, explained:

“Our customers want a host of new network-centric services – fibre, line-bonding, failover as well as cloud services – and so we have to be able to deliver as much bandwidth as a customer wants, wherever they want it and at a competitive price. And if they want all their sites pushed into a dedicated private cloud we have to be able to do that in an instant for them too.

The new Service Exchange Platform builds in the functionality and capacity we need to deliver this, and we will have slots available for 100 Gb/s services for when customers are ready to take them.”

It’s understood that Fluidata has selected hardware from Juniper for their new core backbone infrastructure and Cisco for the high-capacity DSL aggregation. Planning for the upgrade itself is already underway and the new hardware equipment is expected to be rolled out over the coming month (i.e. before the “Olympic freeze” when new network developments must be paused for the London 2012 Olympic Games).

According to Daniell, the new network should be completed in November 2012 and all existing customer services will then be migrated on to the platform by the end of March 2013. At present the SEP connects into over 15 DSL and fibre carriers across the UK and delivers services to over 50 providers along with Fluidata’s direct customers and partners. We covered this new service in more detail as part of our interview with Piers Daniell last year.