Broadband ISP Ogi Visualises its Fibre Optic Backhaul Network
Welsh internet provider Ogi, which is building a multi-Gigabit capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network for homes and businesses across South Wales, has today published an interesting visualisation of their optical backhaul network that shows all the key fibre links and distances between their key locations (Points of Presence).
The network operator has so far covered a total of 100,000 premises with their new full fibre network – most of them residential – in Wales up to the end of 2023 (up from 60k on 30th June 2023) and they’re also now home to a total of over 15,000 customers (4th March 2024), which is up from 10,000 on 4th Jan 2024 and 6,000 on 30th June 2023.
The new visualisation of Ogi’s optical Dense Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (DWDM) network doesn’t tell us anything particularly new or surprising, it’s just quite a fun and interesting way of showing everybody how much work has been done to build the network and the way they’ve organised it, albeit only visualised to a very high / simplistic level.
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Justin Leese, Ogi’s CTO, said:
“Here at Ogi we talk a lot about the towns where we’re building fibre across South Wales, and rightly so. However, we’ve not said much about the glue that connects those towns together and provides onward connectivity to the internet exchanges at London Internet Exchange (LINX), LINX Wales and LINX Manchester.
Over the past 2.5 years we’ve created a pan-South Wales optical backhaul network that gives us high capacity between those towns right now and massive scalability for the future. It also provides connectivity to our IT platforms, including our VoIP/SIP telephony systems, that are based in Vantage Data Centers. All of this achieved in a part of the UK that is not blessed with lots of pre-existing infrastructure.
We’ve worked with our own Network Build team to create many of these long-distance fibre routes using PIA. This has included significant engineering challenges, such as getting multi-ducts and fibre across the Cleddau Bridge in Pembrokeshire. Where it’s not been cost-effective or timely to build our own routes, we’ve worked with a variety of wholesale partners to take IRU’s or rent fibres to form this backbone.
Congratulations to my Director of Engineering and Network Ops, Doug Williams and his Network Engineering team (David Jones, Sophie Bartlett, Philip Jewell and Liam Mainwaring) who have diligently built the Points of Presence, commissioned the optical circuits and created this in a surprisingly short timeframe. I am super proud of you all.”
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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Nice to publicly celebrate the achievements of an engineering team!
Neat.
This is how ISPs can make me trust them more – by sharing technical details of their network.
I’ve been using Ogi since it first arrived in Haverfordwest. It has been flawless. Ping is 9-10ms.
Thank you Ogi.
Happy Ogi User in RCT. Bring on the multi gig offerings.
;-)
The cost of this must be astronomical
… Perhaps it’s the only way to get service to these remote locations.
Somewhat ouchy when they plan on passing 150,000 premises by 2025. That’s not that many folks to spread this kind of investment across. They know their business better than we do, though, so evidently it makes sense for them.
Three parts to the answer to this and the other comment to it:
1) For aggregating lots of high capacity users in this part of the world, you are spot on. The options are limited once you get outside of Cardiff, Newport and Swansea. So unless you want to combine lots of Openreach 10Gbps EADs you really need to self build as OSEA is not available at many of the locations and there are few other wholesale options.
2) Building it is largely capex, and creates an asset, whereas EAD and OSEA (where available) build a significant recurring opex fee on the balance sheet.
3) If we were only building to 150k residential prems it might not make sense. But we have a significant B2B business (not just connectivity we are the largest Microsoft Solution Provider in Wales). Also we are starting to develop a portfolio of wholesale products both lit, dark fibre and duct services. Finally we aspire to go well beyond 150k.
Very few other altnets seem big on business services, all Ogi need to be able to do is provide L2 services between sites on the network for a bit less than an EAD would cost and multi-site companies within the footprint would be all over it. It’s also fairly long-term revenue as companies are too busy to want to change their WAN stuff out at the rate that consumer contracts would churn.
There’s also an element of Ogi being one of the few ISPs that keeps the traffic within Wales rather than it going off to London and back – so if your office is on an Ogi ethernet service and you have some home workers on their broadband you’re going to get some really good latency.
That is exactly why my last sentence was ‘They know their business better than we do, though, so evidently it makes sense for them.’.
In their part of the world I imagine backhaul options are pretty limited so it’s Openreach or build your own. More populated areas Neos, etc, to the rescue.
I’m not sure if you’d want to buy L2 off them though, have you seen their Openreach Access Locate racks? Refurbished Juniper QFX with no sensible layer 2 features and Mikrotik switches for EAD aggregation! If I was buying wholesale L2 then my expectations of a provider using carrier gear would be higher.
Bulk of these optical links in the diagram are Openreach DFX, follow by some odd National Grid (aka Surf Telecoms aka Western Power) and Virgin circuits. Smaller circuits, think sub 20km around their FTTP build areas are likely to be PIA self installed.
Refurb stuff sound great prevents ewaste, no? Ogi are investing in the Welsh economy! Hating on them just makes you sound very bitter Anon. My children say ogi is amazing compared to their mates broadband. That’s good enough for me.
I wish them luck and they do well.
I’m surprised they don’t have more of a presence at Vantage data centre in Newport. We ended up having to get connectivity from Virgin Media.
That makes little sense Tom. According to BGPinfo/ peeringDB etc, Ogi have a lot capacity and connectivity from Vantage.
Vantage is shown on the map between Cardiff and Newport…
^
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Is that Ogi Wan Kenobi?
Two Thirds of the UK now has access to full fibre and that percentage is increasing by about 1% a month
Even better if the diagram was live with status traffic lights/loading meter diagrams