The new network was jointly designed to provide Griffin with a highly flexible national infrastructure, which will be piloted in London. The need to maximize the capacity of Griffin’s London Metro Ethernet network led the company’s network team to choose Transmode’s new layer 2 Ethernet Muxponder family including the recently announced EMXP II 80.
Griffin’s deployment of Transmode’s EMXP II 80 will be the first such deployment in the UK. The choice was made after an extensive search for a supplier that could meet Griffin’s requirement to cost-effectively add at least 300% capacity year-on-year for the next three years. The company undertook a major comparative assessment, looking at different potential architectures from a number of vendors.
The choice of simply adding more dark fibre or moving to a managed iWDM solution clearly showed that the latter would give a better return on the CAPEX investment. “The new network will break even in less than a year, and years two and three will have only small incremental costs, rather than continued exponential costs as capacity grows,” said Adrian Sunderland, CTO at Griffin. “Additionally, we wanted total control over our whole network in order to ensure the most reliable solution for our customers.”
“Our previous design meant we had to scale the number of fibres as traffic grew. Working with the Transmode optical network we can now massively increase the amount of traffic that we can carry on each and every fibre in the network,” continued Sunderland. “We needed to be able to scale our network to give us more flexible growth options. Working with Transmode, we are now also able to enter new markets with Ethernet Wavelength services. While Griffin is experienced in all aspects of data networking, Transmode’s optical networking expertise and training capabilities are equally important as we move our business to the next growth phase.”
The Ethernet Muxponder (EMXP II 80) is part of a suite of products that addresses Transport Ethernet applications within the Native Packet Optical architecture and provides competitive advantage to operators in areas such as mobile backhaul and regional Ethernet services. The new EMXP II 80 extends the capabilities for Layer 2 Ethernet to higher capacity networks.
“The Transmode team has always designed network solutions in a consultative way. Our main aim is to help customers build cost-effective, reliable and flexible networks that can grow with their business,” said Björn Andersson VP Sales. “We are delighted with this new Griffin deployment, which is an example of our consultative approach, leading to major deployments of our Ethernet Muxponder family.”