Late last year we gave members the opportunity to pre-order ports at our new PoP in Auckland – Datacom Orbit Drive, followed by a happy announcement that services were up and running in late January. Datacom joins the network as part of a planned series of upgrades to our Auckland ring (project AKL_EX22) as traffic continues to grow and the demand for capacity grows along with it! Contractors delivered 1 x 96F MTP structured cabling to both telco rooms 1 and 2 with new dark fibre paths entering the data centre form separate entries and telco rooms, increasing diversity. With a current average daily peak of 370Gbps, AKL-IX is our largest IX and is set to get even bigger.
The new MDR <> Datacentre220 path was installed December 2022 and has been pushing traffic since. Our path between these sites is a diverse 2x100G path for a total of 400G of point-to-point capacity!
The goal of the AKL_EX22 project is to deliver a 400G redundant and diverse ring network with a path forward to the 400G Switch + 800G/1.2T ring into the future. Our DWDM 400G Muxponder has arrived, but unfortunately we’ve been hit with massive delays on the east and west dark fibre paths, that are being supplied by Vodafone. We had hoped they would arrive in December!
The East path has been partially delivered to us at the end of March 2023 and work is underway to get cross connects done, testing the line with ODTR then installing our DWDM hardware to bring the link up. The west path delivery is expected to take longer with works required in the middle of the highway and on top of this we are being asked by our DC provider, Spark, to relocate racks at MDR! An IAA engineer may be shipped over to NZ to get these big changes done.
