iiNet stiffens backbone with 100Gig Ethernet

Win for Juniper

iiNet is gearing up for Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) with Juniper’s first Asia-Pac 100 Gbps Ethernet deployment to beef up backbone capacity. .

The ISP put Juniper T1600 core routers into its network at the beginning of the year, and began trialling the 100 Gbps interfaces back in May.

The anticipated growth in customer access speeds under Australia’s fibre network, which will initially offer plans of up to 100 Mbps but can support up to gigabit speeds, will put pressure on ISP backbones, mostly scaled to support connections that max out well below the theoretical 24 Mbps offered by ADSL2+.

The only exceptions are a comparative handful of households with 100 Mbps-plus cable Internet services, and even those have their throughput effectively capped by the high contention on HFC networks.

iiNet has already stretched its service footprint well beyond a “bit pipe”, with traditional and VoIP-based voice services, and a content tie-up with Fetch TV covering video content. It claims 1.3 million customers across its full range of services, but vanilla Internet access remains its staple.

The T1600 is Juniper’s flagship, with 1.6 Tbps of core routing capacity, and the 100 Gbps Ethernet interfaces have pluggable optical modules for future upgrades.