Speaker
Mr
Tim Rossiter
(Sky Network Services)
Description
The Sky Broadband network deployed the new Cisco NCS6000 8 Tbit core router across its core network in 2014 to support rapidly growing network traffic and subscriber numbers (now peaking at 2500 Gbit/s to over 5 million subscribers). At the same time it moved to 100Gbit links within the core and is starting to use 100Gbit for external interconnects. This paper describes the architectural choices, migration process and initial experience with the new technology.
Summary
This paper describes the network growth and evolution through three generations of router technology as traffic has grown from 40 Gbit/s to 2500 Gbit/s.
This growth is not abating and traffic has doubled between 2013 and 2014 so it was necessary to deploy a new core router that had sufficient capacity to handle sustained growth over the next five years at least.
The new routers and 100G transmission had to be introduced seamlessly into a network that was already running close to capacity.
The migration process and architectural solutions were further complicated by constraints on the availability of the leading edge hardware
Primary author
Mr
Tim Rossiter
(Sky Network Services)
