Faster Broadband Coming to the Channel Islands and Isle of Man

Some 170,000 homes and businesses across the Channel Islands (Jersey and Guernsey) and Isle of Man could soon see faster broadband speeds after local ISP Sure completed a major network capacity upgrade, which was delivered by technology and civil engineering provider Telent.

Until recently Sure was reliant on a 10G core network. But in order to support new technologies, such as Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP), they worked with Telent to upgrade the existing platform to a new 100G Juniper core network. The increased capacity will thus help to underpin future upgrades to domestic, public sector and business connectivity, while also enabling them to keep pace with generally rising demands for data.

The project from Telent is said to have entailed major capacity upgrades and crucial security enhancements to replace the existing equipment in the Sure network. The final customer migrations were completed in January 2022, with all ongoing upgrade, maintenance and quality assurance work for the foreseeable future scheduled by Telent to ensure a continuous connection to the Channel Islands and Isle of Man.

As a core network, the upgrade also delivered increased capacity and improved latency to London and Paris – international connectivity for the islands is provided through dedicated Points of Presence (PoPs) in both locations.

Cyrille Joffre, Sure’s COO, said:

“The network upgrades from Telent have delivered increased capacity and high-speed connections to the Channel Islands to connect businesses and public sector organisations.

Coupled with our tier3 datacentres and private cloud infrastructure located in both Guernsey and Jersey, the Telent and Sure successful 100 Gigabits infrastructure collaboration opens a new horizon for international and local business looking to setup or expand business leveraging Sure’s services.

And this future-proofed network means that we are well-placed for roll outs of the latest technologies in the years ahead.”

Telent also moved to tackle the risk of international cyber threats by implementing a joint Corero Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) solution to provide real time, automated protection (this detects any signs of incoming threats and blocks the malicious traffic that could potentially degrade the network performance).