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16 Vol. 40 No. 3 - August 2018 Issue Thai cave rescue demonstrates benefits of rapidly deployable Wi-Fi industry news A rapidly growing tech firm will soon become operator of the largest privately-owned network in the UK, thanks to pioneering deals with two leading infrastructure builders. Commsworld has propelled itself towards the top of the UK’s provider rankings after pushing the button on plans to build its own national optical core network, underpinned by exclusive access to long-distance fibre networks fromCityFibre and Zayo. The move means that the Edinburgh-headquartered business will almost triple the size of its existing dark fibre estate, connecting to more than 20 of the UK’s major cities, including Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and London. As well as providing a huge upgrade to Commsworld’s existing core network capacity, the new network will allow the firm to offer more than 250,000 businesses high connection speeds, adding over 2,000km of Dark Fibre to its existing 750km of on/off-net metro Ethernet tails. The 12- and 10-year contracts with CityFibre and Zayo respectively, enable Commsworld to offer its low-latency network connectivity and cloud services across the whole of the UK in what is the largest investment of its type in the company’s history. Ricky Nicol, Chief Executive of Commsworld, explained: “I can’t overstate how exciting this step forward is for us. This network expansion takes us from a predominantly Scottish- centric provider to a UK provider, another milestone for us in the long-term strategy to take the business to that UK level. Previously, outside Scotland, we’ve used fibre networks owned and managed by others, but this development means we have full control – and the bandwidth available is only determined by the equipment we use on the end of the fibre.” The Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) network that Commsworld will build to light the fibre will be capable of four terabits per second on day one but is effectively unlimited as faster optical transmission equipment becomes available, added the company. In addition to the new 2,058km national figure-of-eight ring that Commsworld will control across the UK, the firm will also be bringing ten of CityFibre’s Gigabit cities fully on-net. This means that a further 830km of CityFibre’s metro networks, addressing hundreds of thousands of business premises, will be accessible over the new network. As a result of the major network expansion, Commsworld will open another 30 points of presence (PoPs), largely in data centre facilities across the UK. Commsworld becomes operator of UK’s largest privately-owned network Ricky Nicol, Chief Executive, Commsworld According to Cambium Networks, a global provider of wireless networking solutions, disaster preparedness and response have entered a new era, where providing first responders and emergency workers (as well as the public) with internet connectivity has become a critical factor in effective operations. This was recently demonstrated during the dramatic cave rescue in Thailand, where 12 young boys and their soccer coach were trapped for two weeks, culminating in a rescue operation that captured the attention of the entire world. Thanks to the numerous emergency and military personnel, and volunteer experts, the “Wild Boars” soccer team and their coach were rescued. “Connectivity is vitally important to first responders, aid agencies, medical services and families as and when unforeseen events happen,” said Rohit Mehra, Vice President, Network Infrastructure, IDC. “Wireless connectivity is a proven solution for disaster recovery when it is rapidly deployed and reliable, provides high performance and is immediately interoperable with a diverse set of user devices. The incredible

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