Kordia upgrades North Island backhaul networks

Kordia says it has completed a major upgrade to its North Island fibre backhaul network that will greatly increase its capacity. ”The multimillion dollar investment in Ciena Networks’ DWDM [dense wave division multiplexing] optical solutions takes Kordia’s core infrastructure to a potential capacity of 9.6 terabits per second,” the company said.

Kordia said the upgrade would provide, initially, an additional 100Gbps of dedicated capacity between service nodes in Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga, Napier, Palmerston North and Wellington, and 100Gbps per second links would be added to other towns as required.

In December 2015, Kordia announced a multimillion dollar investment in DWDM and ethernet technology to be supplied by Ciena for “a 9.6Tbps capable packet optical network optimised for delivery of 10 and 100Gbps service connections with very low latency between major UFB points of interconnect, data centres and larger customer sites in the North Island.”

It also said at that time that “aggressive optical network rollout” had enabled it to meet “a 1 December go-live date with the first major interconnection nodes within Auckland and between Hamilton, Palmerston North and Wellington ready to take on customer traffic,” and that additional connectivity and interconnection nodes between Auckland, Tauranga, Napier and Wellington were expected to be available in early 2016.

Announcing the latest upgrade, Kordia’s chief technology officer, Aaron Olphert, said Ciena had been chosen to supply the optical technology for the upgrade in part because of its software-defined network capabilities which, while not employed at present, would provide further future-proofing of Kordia’s core network.

He said it represented completion of a project for which the business case had been established some years back in anticipation of a coming bandwidth tsunami driven by the ultrafast broadband rollout. “That tsunami is breaking now and Kordia has more than enough capacity to meet customer demand in the foreseeable future,” he said.

He said progress in the UFB rollout in the North Island was producing a massive uptake in bandwidth from Kordia’s wholesale customers, several of which had signed up for 10Gbps services on the upgraded network.

"Ten gigabit today is becoming the norm; in another 24 months, we’re expecting 100 gigabit connections to become standard and it will keep scaling from there, particularly as more local fibre companies start rolling out 1 gigabit connections to residential users,” Olphert said.