2358 down, 3576 to go

To expand on Rachel’s blog entry from last week: we’re now the proud owners of ≈2400km of dark fibre that makes up the Janet6 core. This is the central ‘ladder’ structure that runs up the country and consists of key points of presence in London, Bristol, Birmingham, Nottingham, Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh, and plenty more inbetween. The core of the network then extends out to the regional fibre infrastructure and connects to the 18 regional networks, so it’s clearly an integral part of Janet. The acceptance process consisted of us receiving an acceptance ‘pack’ (a ton of documents) for each fibre route (of which there are 30 on the core) and each PoP (of which there are 27 on the core), which members of the Janet6 project team and the wider Janet family spent many an hour reviewing from the perspective of ensuring what had been delivered matched up to the requirements specified contractually. Thankfully they did and we happily accepted the core fibre infrastructure on 7th February, 2 weeks ahead of schedule.

This core fibre is the first of 5 acceptance phases we’ll be going through with SSET, the remaining 4 being the fibre connecting the regional networks to the core, split roughly into 4 geographical groups. The acceptance processes for phases 2 to 5 will start towards the end of this month with final acceptance of the entire ≈6000km of fibre scheduled for the end of March.

As for the photo, I spent yesterday working in our ‘other’ London office, a short walk from Euston station (what I refer to as our main London office is actually our Networks Operations Centre, but mere Project Managers like myself aren't really allowed in there in case we break something). It was a clear day which meant I had a good view of the BT tower when stood outside the office. You can probably tell I don’t go to London very often.