BT Wholesale Launch New 100Gbps Product for UK ISPs and Data Centres
BT Wholesale has launched a new 100Gb Data Centre Connect (DCC) product, which enables network operators to benefit from a single 100Gbps data centre port, which marks a nice improvement on the current approach (i.e. achieving such speeds would normally require the aggregation and management of multiple 10Gbps circuits).
The new product will initially be made available in the Telehouse North and Telehouse North Two data centres in London, although BT Wholesale said they would be rolling out the higher bandwidth service to more data centres across the country.
According to BTW’s Gavin Jones: “100Gb Data Centre Connect enhances our partners capability to support their customers who are increasingly demanding greater connectivity. That has been driven largely by the acceleration of digital transformation strategies, cloud migration, as well as the evolution of data centres, AI and IoT technologies, partners require access solutions that deliver more capacity while reducing cost and complexity of deployment.”
Speaking of 100G products, Openreach has separately launched a number of new Optical Spectrum Access (OSA) service options to support native 100Gb services for business connectivity and network operators (here).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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‘Separately’ is doing some work when Openreach release a product commercially and BT Wholesale announce their own product based on it within a day 😉
The BT Wholesale 100Gb product is offered in 3rd party Data Centres and has no dependency on Openreach access especially as 3rd party Data Centres are deregulated by Ofcom.
Cool. What are they offering 100G between if it’s all within a datacentre with no Openreach involvement and why would anyone use them when they can just pay the datacentre for a fibre pair?
Actually I missed a bit. When were datacentres ever regulated by Ofcom? Private property with private networks sold on a purely commercial basis, no?
Answered my own question.
BT Enterprise appear to be offering customers a switch which they rent rather than buying.
Customer still needs a 100G port to connect to BT Enterprise but no longer need 10G ports as BT will handle it and present 100G.
Pay BT for the connectivity to the DC LAN, pay a markup, pay for the 100G or buy a switch – a switch with 2 x 100G ports and 16 25G ports costs £1600 – and pay the DC for fibre.
I can’t say I get it but I was certainly mistaken when I thought it used Openreach. The product is so ridiculous I didn’t think it could possibly be this way so I stand both corrected and amused.
This is just a 100G NNI to present Ethernet (and presumably Broadband Tails on). I don’t understand what on earth you are talking about here?
Yes, this product can deliver Ethernet vlans from all over the country to a single 100Gbps interface. Eg dozens of branch offices to a central system hosted in the datacente. Today the company might need multiple 10Gbps ports from BT in the datacentre to deliver the traffic, which is less efficient and less flexible.
100GBe UNI/NNI configured channels have been available on DWDM for a good few years, I’m quite surprised this product is only available now. I can’t tell from the datasheet if the connection is via a DWDM channel connecting to a core Switch-Router at a BT site, or if they’ve installed Switch-Routers at the Datacentre’s.
The Datasheet says:
“DCC is the quickest, most cost-effective and
resilient way for you to connect your network to
ours. It might sound familiar to you, as it’s known
in the industry as a hub or network-to-network
interconnect (NNI). It’s our recommended method
of aggregating your customers’ traffic. All you
need is to have a presence in one of our third-party
datacentres across the UK”
https://www.btwholesale.com/assets/documents/products-and-services/data/wholesale-ethernet/learn-more/btw-data-centre-connect-datasheet.pdf
What’s a ‘Switch-Router’?
I have never heard anyone use that term. Layer 3 switch, sure.
BT has installed MPLS device in datacentres. So the 100GE link from the customer is in-building fibre, then ethernet vlans are carried from the in-building MPLS device to the customer’s other locations around the country over MPLS, using PWE3. An MPLS device is a router, but when it is being used to carry layer2 services like Ethernet is is essentially acting as a switch, so I can understand why someone would refer to it as a switch-router.
And I’m still stuck with 30 mbps down and 5 mbps up.
Unless you live in a datacentre this is kinda unrelated. There are 400G and faster links. Our homes don’t sit on the backbone of the Internet.
“I have never heard anyone use that term. Layer 3 switch, sure.”
It was a term our instructor used when I learned how to reconfigure cisco routers and switches. He used it as a descriptive term for products like the Catalyst 6500. Switching is layer 2, routing is layer 3. A layer 3 switch is basically a layer 2 switch with a routing module. Hope that explains the term.
Yeah got what it meant just never heard the term before. I suppose it isn’t much worse than ‘layer 3 switch’.