LOS ANGELES—Colt Technology Services is now serving up high-bandwidth internet connectivity provisioned in near-real-time with the launch of its IP Access service.
IP Access is provisioned over Colt's software-defined networking-enabled On Demand platform. As the name implies, Colt's On Demand bandwidth service allows customers to spin up additional bandwidth as needed in near real time. It first launched in Europe two years ago and was rolled out into Asia Pacific last year. Colt announced in may that On Demand that its On Demand services were available in the U.S., Hong Kong, Portugal, and Austria.
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Colt’s IP Access On Demand is now available in Europe, and is expected to roll out in Asia and the U.S. next year. At the MEF19 conference in Los Angeles, Colt's Mirko Voltolini, global head of network on demand and a member of MEF's board of directors, said IP Access has been in production for a while.
"Now we can deliver internet access from multiple different locations in our footprint in Europe initially through the same on demand portal that we've been using for Ethernet and cloud access," Voltolini said. "That's a big additional step as we move into Layer 3 services."
Colt’s IP Access product is supported by the wholly-owned and managed Colt IQ Network, which is comprised of more than 900 data centers and 27,500 on net buildings globally.
“We are not aware of any other providers who are able to offer IP Access On Demand services on this scale; to hundreds of data centers and tens of thousands of enterprise buildings," said Colt's Peter Coppens, vice president product portfolio, in a statement. "Colt is prioritizing giving more control to our customers because we know enterprises today require high bandwidth, on-demand solutions to truly drive their continual digital transformations.”
With the IQ Network, Colt's customers also have the ability to connect in real-time to many of the cloud environments. In August, Colt announced it was teeing up direct on-demand connections for enterprises globally on Google Cloud Platform.
Using Colt's Dedicated Cloud Access offering, which runs across the Colt IQ Network, customers can connect from enterprise buildings or data centers directly to their Google Cloud instances with customer-dedicated bandwidth with low latency. Dedicated Cloud Access is also in use by other Colt cloud partners, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud.
Colt's roadmap ramps up
"We're adding a cloud capability that will be launched in early January," Voltolini said "It will allow customers to connect between clouds directly without going back to the retail buildings for the enterprise. It's a multi-cloud capability where we'll put this bridge in the middle and allow traffic to go between the different clouds and back through the enterprise."
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Voltolini said a customer recently told him that due to a lack of redundant links between cloud providers, such as Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, it takes six high-speed links between clouds. Colt isn't saying which cloud providers are using the bridges, but it seems to be a safe bet that one or two of the "big three" are giving it a try.
"If you put a gateway in the middle you can reduce the links to two, a primary and a backup," Voltolini said. "That's coming in early January."
Colt has also enabled, but not yet announced, inter-continent connectivity by using its subsea capacity.
"Today we have islands between Europe, in the U.S and within Asia," Voltolini said."We have been working to enable inter-continent connectivity and we are already delivering services. You can order a service between Tokyo and New York that's truly on demand through the platform in real time. So, now we are making this a global platform."