Future Proofing our Network

Last year MLL announced an investment of over £1M in a state-of-the-art Core Network. Based on world-leading high-speed NGN technology from Juniper and secured by cutting-edge Fortinet firewall solutions, the all-new network will be pivotal to further enhancing the quality and speed of delivery of MLL’s existing and future services – for many years to come.

With the network upgrade project now well underway, we thought it timely to sit down with Phil Cripps, MLL Operations Director, to find out how things are progressing and hear more about the benefits it will bring to MLL and our customers.

So, why did MLL decide to embark on this significant project?

As a trusted secure connectivity partner to organisations delivering UK critical infrastructure, it’s of paramount importance that MLL’s network is reliable and secure. The work to maintain these standards never stops but once in a while big changes are needed to make sure we’re ready for the growth plans of our customer base.

That’s why right now, utilising our network design and engineering expertise, we are hard at work replacing MLL’s central core network infrastructure. The work involves the replacement of our core routers and switches in our two UK data centres used for connecting customer networks and the third-party peering exchanges MLL support. The Internet, HSCN and PSN to name just a few.

“Encompassing over 100 PoPs across England and Scotland and enabling thousands of connections, MLL’s totally new, fully resilient high-speed Core Network is designed to support our, and the needs of our customers, today and long into the future. We will be able to design, configure and provision new and innovative services more quickly while improving traffic flow.”

Tell us more about the implementation and how this will benefit MLL and its customers?

There are three key areas:

• Improved speed and quality of service provision. The investment we are making in our core routing engines enables us to take advantage of automation for a number of network configuration tasks. This automation will reduce the number of manual touchpoints when we are provisioning new customer services. This will reduce errors when building configurations, troubleshoot more easily as well as improve the time it takes to build a customer service. For example, it will provide us with a more streamlined and automated solution for ordering parts and equipment from partners and suppliers.

• Increased bandwidth. As part of the network refresh, we are upgrading the connectivity within the MLL network and scaling up capacity by more than ten-fold to enable customer speeds of over 100Gbps. Furthermore, with customer adoption of next generation zero trust connectivity picking up pace, it’s vital that we can support this growth with increased capacity between our data centres and peering exchanges. In the interests of seamless company-wide integration it’s also directly connected to our Network Operations Centre.

• Reducing complexity. By focusing our network technologies on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant vendors and installing fewer but higher capacity routers and switches, we can ensure sustained high resilience and reliability, even as network traffic continues to grow over the coming years. Fewer points of failure in the network also reduce maintenance costs.

Finally, when will the project be completed?

As one can imagine, this is a major undertaking requiring detailed planning and methodical and thorough execution to ensure a smooth transition. Mitigating the risk of service disruption to our customers is the number one priority.

We are therefore delighted with the progress made so far, having already successfully migrated over all MLL’s centralised services to the new network. There’s also a clear schedule of migrations in place for the remaining services, which means we’re well on track for our target December completion date!

Watch this space for further news on MLL’s exciting Core Network transformation and evolution programme.