Fujitsu has signed a ten-year agreement with SEE Telecoms for a national fiber-optic colocation network spanning 15 sites and 2,500km.

The network will link Fujitsu data center sites in London, Reading, Bristol, Birmingham, Leicester, Leeds and Manchester, while providing Fujitsu data centers with access to SSE’s already established 5,000km fiber network and colocation sites.

SSE Telecom is the telecommunications subsidiary of Scottish and South Energy, which also has a data center business with a number of facilities in the UK.

In February this year it launched two new data center projects in the country,  which once complete will bring a total of 108,000 sq ft of data center space to market.

One site is in Bracknell, south west of Slough, and the other is in Perivale, near Wembley in London.

Fujitsu also has a number of data centers in the UK. Early in July it announced it would be extending its 100G high-speed national fiber network to add an additional 2,500km of dark fiber with SSE.

It said this at the end of the contract, its dark fiber network will stretch more than 6,000km.

Fujitsu UK and Ireland executive director for Hosting & Network Solutions Andy Stevenson said the provider is seeing more demand from companies wanting to transport high-bandwidth data “faster and further than ever before”.

“An effective infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) begins and ends with the network; the true benefits can only be realized if the interconnect between enterprise and data center does not present a bottleneck,” Stevenson said.

The network will use ADVA Optical Networking’s 100G Agile Core platform with flexible reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers (ROADM). These allow real-time wavelength provisioning and switching across the core network.

This will help Fujitsu provision bandwidth on demand, making its network more scalable paving the way for the delivery of cloud services.