SSE Telecoms in 7 Year Network Sharing Deal with Updata and Capita

The enterprise division of SSE Telecoms today claims to have shaved two years off their on-going ‘Project Edge‘ fibre optic network expansion in the United Kingdom, which has been achieved by signing a 7-year network sharing deal with Updata and Capita plc.

At present around 265+ Point of Presence (PoP) across the United Kingdom can offer access to the operator’s 10Gbps (Gigabits per second) capable “enterprise-class” fibre optic and Ethernet network, which is already being used by 300+ IT / telecoms service provider customers and covers about 250,000 business postcodes.

However the new deal will effectively double the number of business postcodes covered to 500,000 (adding 350 BT exchanges to their network footprint) and they claim that this should “reduce the cost of [our Project Edge] network expansion by at least 50 percent.”

Colin Sempill, MD at SSE Enterprise Telecoms, said:

“It is extremely exciting to be announcing such a significant agreement to the IT & telecoms market. Network and infrastructure sharing models like this are commonplace in mobile telephony markets, but very unusual on this scale in fixed line telecoms. Doubling our service footprint in a relatively short period of time will make us one of the largest fixed line telecoms providers in the UK at a stroke.

When combined with our reputation for reliability and service delivery performance, it will allow many thousands more businesses to benefit from our brand of high capacity, high availability services more cost effectively than ever before.”

On the flip side Updata and Capita will see each of their 8 regional data centres being connected directly to SSE’s national fibre optic network, which will enable them to offer a higher level of availability, secure and more scalable set of connectivity solutions to their major government and corporate clients.

Béatrice Butsana-Sita, Updata’s Managing Director, added that the new network would “allow us to provide dedicated networking services to enterprise-sized clients who need connectivity in all corners of the UK.”