eircom Wholesale and the managed network services company Interfusion announced on Wednesday that Interfusion had secured five new customer wins, spread across the enterprise and government sectors,including SIAC construction, and Bord na Mona , using eircom Wholesale’s NGN core fibre-optic platform.

In June, eircom Wholesale launched NGN Ethernet, the first wholesale telecom service in Ireland that enables operators such as Interfusion to deliver services at speeds of up to 1 Gigabit per second to business customers across Ireland.

Steve MacNicholas, Interfusion's Managing Director, said “In very challenging economic times businesses across Ireland are boosting productivity and controlling costs by moving away from legacy telecoms platforms to the significantly higher Internet and wide-area networking speeds that fibre Ethernet enables. The availability of this new fibre-optic capacity through operators such as Interfusion is fundamentally changing the telecoms landscape in Ireland, with cost-effective, high bandwidth access now a viable option for a wide range of businesses nationally, across all vertical sectors.”

Welcoming the opening of the eircom NGN core fibre network to all operators Steve continued "A year ago, I would not have expected that Interfusion would have access to the eircom core fibre-optic IP network and be in a position to sell these fibre based services to our customers at these speeds, throughout the country. But because eircom Wholesale has genuinely made the eircom network "open for business" to other operators it really is business users who benefit through very high speed bandwidth at competitive prices from operators such as ourselves."

 

Commenting on Interfusion’s recent success Gerry McAndrew, Acting Director of eircom Wholesale said "eircom’s NGN investment has seen over 10,000 fibre kilometres lit across the country, enabling thousands of Irish businesses to access speeds of up to 1000 Megabits per second. We will continue to invest to ensure Ireland Inc has access to very high bandwidth in as many sites as possible and we’re delighted that through operators such as Interfusion use of the NGN is being maximised by businesses in urban and rural locations.”

NGN Ethernet is a critical step in supporting the competitiveness of Irish business and the cost effectiveness of Irish government operations, as Ireland's available bandwidth increasingly becomes a benchmark for the quality of our overall national infrastructure.

 

Steve MacNicholas noted that the increasing trend towards cloud computing is driving bandwidth demand. Cloud services involve the centralisation of shared IT resources based in commercial data centres or enterprise head offices; as users become separated from their key applications, flexible, reliable and scalable telecommunications are a prerequisite for effective ICT delivery.

"Cloud computing is one of the major trends driving the need for speed, and low latency is as essential as high bandwidth in the reliable delivery of these services," Steve said. "Fibre is ultimately the leading access technology that can deliver the calibre of connectivity that customers need. The fact that Irish customers, through operators like ourselves, can now access these essentially unlimited speeds over the eircom core network is a real game changer for Irish enterprise, and very good news in this recessionary environment."