Deal is big packet optical win for Transmode
Mobile Broadband Network Ltd (MBNL), the company that operates the 3G network used by Everthing Everywhere and Three UK, has signed an eight year, £100 million deal to upgrade their backhaul network.
MBNL has signed a deal with Virgin Media Business (VMB) which will see it become the first customer for VMB’s Sync-E solution. The contract will see VMB build 14 regional aggregation networks across the UK to enhance MBNL’s bandwidth capacity. A statement said the deployment would be the UK’s only synchronous Ethernet mobile backhaul service. The first phase of deployment will see MBNL have access to a 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps) Ethernet service to meet growing mobile data demand.
EE and Three have 35.2 million customers between them, and are faced with same the priorities that all mobile operators are in dealing with the growth in mobile data on the dowlink and uplink.
Graham Payne, Managing Director, MBNL, said, “Mobile data and the increase in smartphone usage is a big growth opportunity for us. Connecting our end users to the online world, from any location and from any device is at the heart of what we do. Working together with Virgin Media Business, the first company in the market to offer this synchronous Gigabit Ethernet service, we will be able to scale for future demand.”
VMB’s service is built on technology from Transmode. Transmode said that it estimates that the new contract is worth up to SEK150 million in 2011 and 2012 and that deliveries will begin in the third quarter 2011.
The dedicated networks will rely on Transmode’s Native Packet Optical architecture, including the recently-launched Layer 2 Ethernet Muxponder family. Ethernet services will be provided from the mobile operators’ core node locations right through to the operator’s cell sites. Transmode said the service would enable VMB to provide “highly flexible services with better synchronisation performance than alternative solutions in the market”.
“Analysts estimate that by 2015 globally there will be a ten-fold increase to more than two million fibre-connected base stations. We believe that this is one of the biggest packet-optical based mobile backhaul projects in Europe and it will provide Virgin Media Business with a state-of-the-art platform for their Sync-E enabled, Gigabit Ethernet mobile backhaul services,” said Karl Thedéen, Chief Executive Officer at Transmode.