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Company | Customer References

Enlink Networks Metro Ethernet Network

Scale, reliability and performance delivered across the city.

  • Country: United Kingdom
  • Industry: Service Providers
  • Solution: WiFi Solutions

Enlink Networks is a London network service provider that offers Gigabit+ IP and Ethernet connectivity between offices, shops, homes, data centers and cloud on-ramps, as well as network consultancy services and wholesale access to other ISPs.

As demand and network scale grew, Enlink Networks needed a solution ensuring high uptime and simpler operations. ALE switching technology was chosen to deliver performance, resilience and scalability for continued expansion.

Shortest Path Bridging has allowed us to quickly and reliably distribute customer networks across the metro WAN like no other technology has.
Charles Lyons, Operations Director Enlink Networks

Challenges

Enlink Networks was reaching the scalability limits of its existing network solutions, which lacked sufficient port density and 10GE+ interfaces to support growth. As customer virtual circuits increased, complex MPLS implementations introduced recurring software bugs that caused traffic interruptions. Larger platforms were available but came at a high cost with no guarantee of improved stability.

At the same time, an increasingly complex network topology required manual traffic path configuration, making operations difficult to manage. Combined with rising prices and slow vendor response to critical issues, these challenges led Enlink Networks to look for a more scalable, reliable and operationally efficient solution.

Action

Alcatel-Lucent worked closely with Enlink Networks to design and deploy a larger metro network capable of scaling within the same physical footprint while supporting 10-fold increases in port capacity and energy efficiency. By implementing a Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) fabric, ALE delivered a truly plug-and-play solution, significantly reducing deployment times, maintenance windows and the risk of human error through minimal node configuration.

Since deployment, there have been zero traffic-forwarding faults, and convergence times are predictably low, making network faults invisible to end customers. The solution has scaled as demanded with ongoing quarterly growth and is now deployed as a single SPB-powered fabric across the London wide-area metro.

Results

Technical benefits

  • OmniSwitches deliver highly scalable wire-speed throughput with minimal configuration
  • Easy to add, remove and upgrade network nodes
  • Compact, high performance, lower power switches that stack for scalability
  • SPB Ethernet fabric for tunnelling customer Layer 2 traffic, with Layer 3 IP routing

Financial benefits

  • Cost predictability with long-term pricing framework agreement
  • Short Path Bridging capabilities to improve routing with lower Total Cost of Ownership

User experience

  • Simple to manage and configure—from unboxing to production metro Ethernet switch in 30 minutes
  • Scalability without disruption
  • Unnoticeably fast convergence times to work around any network faults
  • A range of switch models and port densities to suit all current use case scenarios

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