What Is Dark Fibre?
A dark or unlit fibre refers to a spare piece of network fibre that is in the ground. Digging fibre optic network routes is a huge investment so cables are often laid with significant additional capacity that can be leased to companies in the future.
Benefits of Dark Fibre
1. Bandwidth Scalability
Dark fibre gives you maximum control and flexibility over your network, allowing your network to scale-up as your bandwidth requirements grow – providing virtually limitless capacity.
2. Privacy & Security
Your network is physically dedicated to your business, and is not shared at any point. This provides you with ultimate peace of mind and can help demonstrate regulatory compliance - your network is 100% private.
3. Route Diversity
Network route diversity is critical to protect your business. You can design a Dark Fibre network that is graphically diverse from other routes you may currently use, or provide a secondary diverse path.
Our Dark Fibre Network
Building a network to support bandwidth-intensive business applications? Or creating your own backhaul network?
Colt is an award-winning dark fibre provider, offering the most extensive and reliable network in Europe. We cover 51 metropolitan areas which are interconnected by our 38,000km network. We’re confident our dark fibre services will meet any future business need.
Looking for dark fibre in the UK? Colt has extensive coverage in the UK with fibre spanning locations including London, Manchester, Birmingham, Reading, Slough and Swindon.
Colt's metropolitan area fibre networks provide highly dense coverage in key business areas, enabling us to provide dark fibre capacity where it's required. We invest continually to ensure sufficient capacity on the network, especially to high-demand locations such as data centres and internet exchanges.
Our dark fibre networks are continually expanding to ensure we add these new locations as they come on-stream. To achieve this, our local network teams maintain excellent relationships with local authorities across Europe in order to carry out civil works to install new fibre quickly and efficiently.
Dave Pearce, Dark Fibre Product Manager
DWDM, or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, has been a key technology evolution, as it allows multiple signals to run over a single strand of fibre, thus dramatically increasing the bandwidth potential of an individual network link.
Today, multiple high-bandwidth services running at 10Gb/s, 40 Gb/s, and 100 Gb/s can be multiplexed onto a wavelength, and delivered over a single strand of fibre. Dark fibre networks represent an excellent way to ensure future capacity demands can be met.
Without DWDM most of the Web 2.0 and cloud-computing solutions in use today would not be possible.
Get a quote for Dark Fibre
Digital transformation is more than raw bandwidth
There’s no shortage of statistics acknowledging the scale of the challenge posed by global consumption of data, and they are all pretty daunting. The latest Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2016–2021 predicts that business IP traffic will grow at a CAGR of 21% from 2016 to 2021.
Colt supports Netgroup with colocation and connectivity
Delivering a project like this in six weeks was extremely fast – the fastest Netgroup has ever achieved. It was only possible because of the willingness and effectiveness of the teams from both Colt businesses.
Steen Andersen, Key Account Manager, Netgroup
