Fusion Broadband embraces Equinix in global expansion of its SD-WAN service

Offers fast deployment of dedicated SD-WAN gateways in 50+ locations worldwide.

  • Thursday, 8th July 2021 Posted 3 years ago in by Phil Alsop

Leading SD-WAN provider, Fusion Broadband, has expanded into Equinix, which will give it a significantly larger global footprint and enable it to offer customers enhanced performance and more advanced connectivity options.

Equinix is a leading digital infrastructure company operating more than 220 data centres in 26 countries on five continents.

As the networking requirements of global businesses become more sophisticated, Fusion Broadband identified a need to support their customers’ growth by leveraging Equinix and offering greater WAN connectivity through direct access to a multitude of cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, Alibaba and Oracle.

Andrew Catchpole, chief executive of Fusion Broadband UK Limited, said the new arrangement with Equinix and Equinix MetalTM will allow the company to quickly and easily provide dedicated SD-WAN gateways in more than 50 location points globally.

“With our unique SD-WAN orchestration platform customers are able to deploy SD-WAN sites and gateways in minuets, as well as enable direct connections with the majority of the major cloud providers. They can be self-managed or our team of SD-WAN specialists can manage them for the customer. Dedicated private backbones between regions can also be provisioned for customers adding a greater level of performance and security.

“With Equinix Fabric TM, we can offer global or national customers faster and more flexible access to all of the cloud services and partners that are on the Platform Equinix®. This allows customers to extend the reach of their SD-WAN network not only globally but also with direct access into the world’s largest cloud service providers.”

As an example, a customer that prefers to have a dedicated environment (as opposed to a shared multi-tenant environment) for its offices in each region may elect to have one or two POPs in each region, which very easily allows a private backbone between POPs to be created that can support speeds from tens of Mbps through to 10-20Gbps.

“By combining the benefits of our POP infrastructure from IBM Cloud and now Equinix, we have a significantly larger global footprint,” Catchpole said.

“Our SD-WAN managed service business already supports over 100 multi-tenant gateways around the world. The addition of Equinix will allow us to further expand this with the ability to deploy dedicated gateways for customers or dedicated private connections between SD-WAN gateways. It can be set up within a matter of hours.”

With Equinix’s private backbone, Fusion Broadband’s international customers can now easily build their own private backbone between their Fusion Broadband SD-WAN gateways – either dedicated or multi-tenant -- where backbone capacity can be scaled up and down as required. These private backbone links offer guaranteed performance and security between gateways.

“The ability to quickly turn on direct links via Equinix or even Megaport’s peering fabrics means we can provide customers with a tremendous amount of connection and SD-WAN flexibility,” he added.