When did you last think about what happens under a manhole cover? Under these, Colt connects businesses so they can access cloud services, send emails, stream media, make calls – plus all the business-critical operations that keep them running.
But what goes on beneath the cover and what does the Colt IQ Network really look like? Here’s what I found out when I joined the Colt team on a fibre installation at London Bridge.
1) It involves abseiling
Getting to our network isn’t straightforward. Under the manhole cover, there is a ladder leading to a tunnel taking fibre to a plant room. The engineer is harnessed, fixed to a tripod and abseils down the tunnel and through the confined space with the cable.
2) Collaboration matters
Connecting a new customer to the Colt IQ Network can involve multiple partners from the customer site team to cloud partners and the skilled engineers on the ground. The dig, fibre installation and fibre termination all call for close collaboration. Colt works with different partners around the world to deliver industry-leading service.
3) Fibre splicing is an art form
It takes highly trained engineers to ensure our network is consistent and reliable. The fibre that transmits data across the network is so fine it’s barely visible. It is fused in a process called splicing, carried out on a machine that the engineers take on site with them. It’s quite an art to splice two bits of glass as thin as a hair together with 0.0 accuracy.
4) There are more than 9000 Colt manhole covers just in London
In London alone, there are at least 9,000 Colt manhole covers on the pavements and roads. Under each one is the network that delivers high bandwidth services to customers around the world. So next time you’re walking through London, Paris, Barcelona or Tokyo, you could be standing over the Colt IQ Network.
5) Our network is continually expanding.
In the last year, Colt has invested heavily in the Colt IQ Network. We’ve recently added 7,000km in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as tripling our presence in Spain, bringing the network to Australia for the first time and expanding even further into Dublin.
More than 27,500 buildings are connected to the Colt IQ Network in Europe, North America and Asia. Is yours? Use our online connectivity checker.
To see more about what we do, check out our social media accounts LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and follow the hashtag #ConnectivityMatters.
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Hannah Davies
25 June 2019
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