The ‘phase one’ rollout has seen Elite offer Gigabit and 100Mbps Ethernet in the UK while still maintaining and installing the Juniper infrastructure. Elite has also laid out an ambitious ongoing exchange rollout strategy, which is designed to help its partners and wholesalers offer the UK’s lowest-cost and highest-quality Ethernet connectivity further afield in Manchester and Birmingham. Expanding the current on-net network is planned to be brought to market within the next 4 - 6 months and will be extended shortly after to other key metro areas across the UK.
“Our decision to expand our footprint nationwide, starting in London, is a result of understanding where the market is heading. With the increasing demand for high bandwidth connectivity, it became increasingly obvious that this could not be achieved using some of the 3rd party carriers. We needed to be able to take control of the end-to-end delivery, avoiding backhaul capacity issues that limit the industry. By investing from the outset in the backhaul capacity, I am confident that Elite can deliver these high capacity services both now and in the future.” Says Elite’s CEO, David Simmons.
Elite has opted to connect its on-net exchanges with Dark Fibre infrastructure, combined with DWDM technology. While Dark Fibre is expensive, it offers the ISP the ability to instantly scale and access virtually limitless back-haul bandwidth at a moment’s notice, when required. This means backhauling traffic from exchanges becomes easier and will not decrease the performance of customers connection if more bandwidth is needed. Using Dark Fibre ensures the network is future-proofed and able to backhaul high-bandwidth client connections of 10Gbps, 100Gbps synchronous.
Matthew Rogers, Elite’s Head of Marketing, says; “While completing an in-depth competitor analysis, it has become apparent that lower bandwidth and unscalable fibre such as 1Gbps and 10Gbps Point to Points have historically been used to link exchanges. While perfectly fine to do so, it isn’t in line with Elite’s flexible or Innovate core values, so we have chosen to offer a completely scalable Dark Fibre service that isn’t restricted by the fibre itself.”