Dark Fibre

Flexible infrastructure solutions to support mission critical networks

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Why Dark Fibre?

As IT continues to converge on the data centre and bandwidth requirements increase, the demands on your network continue to grow. To meet this demand, many organisations are now choosing to integrate Dark Fibre into their network topology.

A Dark Fibre network provides reliable and secure optical infrastructure to enable you to self-manage critical elements of your network. Dark Fibre provides your business with maximum levels of flexibility and control to support virtually unlimited bandwidth increases – at a time and pace to suit you.

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, Net Group

Why choose Colt Dark Fibre?

  • Wholly Owned

    Buying fibre from Colt means you’re in safe hands. Our extensive wholly-owned network is supported 24/7 by over 5,000 employees globally, across 32 countries.

  • Bandwidth Scalability

    Get maximum control and flexibility over your network, allowing your network to scale-up as your bandwidth requirements grow – providing virtually limitless capacity.

  • Unprecedented Reach

    Colt has Dark Fibre available to more than 31,000 buildings – including direct fibre connections to around 1,000 data centres in Europe and Asia – more than any other carrier.

  • Route Diversity

    We understand the importance of network route diversity – our business is to protect your business. We will work with you to design a Dark Fibre network which is geographically diverse from other routes you may currently use, or provide a secondary diverse path.

  • Freedom & Flexibility

    Dark Fibre solutions give you the freedom to deploy and manage the technology of your choice, and give you complete control over configuration.

  • Security & Privacy

    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.

Use our online quoting tool for Dark Fibre.

We’ll ask you for a few pieces of information and be able to provide a quote in less than 24 hours.

Dark Fibre explained

  • 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.

  • 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 38,000 km network.

    We’re confident our dark fibre services will meet any future business need. Our partnership with Ciena is future-proofing our network to power next-generation services and digital transformation.

    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.

  • 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.

  • As demand increases for fibre to support mobile backhaul (MBH) of 5G mobile services, our metro area fibre networks are densifying to meet this demand.

    Fibre will be a core supporting infrastructure within 5G networks, and network densification will be critically important to support a massive increase in demand for fibre connectivity driven by Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) as 5G services begin to roll-out.

  • Colt & Ciena are working together to power next-generation services and digital transformation. By future-proofing our network, we can offer more capacity than ever before, help you deploy bandwidth at scale with greater flexibility, and provide intelligent end-to-end provisioning of optical services for global content networks.

    Read the infographic

  • “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

Our Customers

Use our online quoting tool for Dark Fibre.

We’ll ask you for a few pieces of information and be able to provide a quote in less than 24 hours.

Check availability