Sky's backbone capacity boost

Sky have completed the deployment of a major upgrade to their backbone network capacity in order to support their growing customer base and increased broadband usage (as well as prepare them for any upcoming fibre services they may offer), despite their 'free' broadband tier only having a 2GB monthly usage limit when the average UK broadband punter eats up 17GB of data per month.

What they have hailed as "the country's first 100G (Gb) high-speed optical transmission network" has been deployed in association with French based networking vendor Alcatel-Lucent, whose UK and Ireland chief executive Lucy Dimes is quoted as saying:

"High-definition video and other broadband services are driving up the volume of data being transported on networks today. This trend is driving us to continuously introduce new innovations into our portfolio, while ensuring that our customers can continue to benefit from the investments they have already made.

The introduction of 100G with Sky offers a clear example of the benefits to this approach. It also reinforces our leadership in 100G - 15 months since our launch of this technology we are still the only vendor capable of delivering this kind of speed and capacity on existing networks."

Usage and customer number increases mean that Sky expect to be peaking at 700Gb of traffic by this June.