NaaS Platform | BT’s Global Fabric goes live with customer traffic

BT has announced that customer traffic is now live on Global Fabric, BT’s brand-new network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform for multinational customers. The announcement marks the debut of Global Fabric Internet, the first service offered from the platform, which delivers a step change in flexibility, visibility and performance of connectivity.

Through the platform’s web portal, customers can view connectivity to their apps, network health, events and alerts. It allows them to make changes to their connectivity in an instant, such as scaling up and down bandwidth, as well as provisioning new connections. This offers customers unprecedented flexibility to achieve the best network performance and accelerate their digital business outcomes.

NaaS Platform | BT’s Global Fabric goes live with customer traffic

Thanks to the platform’s brand-new hardware and digital orchestration layer, Global Fabric Internet is available on the same physical port as other connectivity services BT will launch over the coming year. This allows customers to future-proof their connectivity, enabling them to switch between different services with the click of a button and scale up or down instantly rather than in hours, days or weeks.  

BT is now adding more customers, scale and features to the platform, such as intent-based routing, building up to the launch of IP VPN and Ethernet connectivity services. These will be offered together with a choice of solutions such as DDoS cyber-security and SD-WAN.

Global Fabric transforms how businesses interconnect with their customers and suppliers securely and reliably across their full digital value chain. It provides people, devices and AIs with the best connectivity to apps and data hosted across multiple clouds.

James Eibisch, Research Director, IDC European Enterprise Communications Services, said: "The disruption and evolution of enterprise IT doesn't stop with digital transformation. The profound growth of AI and the unpredictability of today's geopolitics create uncertainty about how companies should plan and adapt for the future. To cope with this uncertainty, they need flexibility above all, and a platform approach to delivering connectivity and services provides that. BT Global Fabric helps businesses access technology and services in a secure and sovereign manner, wherever it is located and whenever it is needed."

Bas Burger, CEO, Business, BT, said: “Today marks the start of a new era of international business connectivity. Customers are now joining us on a journey to combine the full power of cloud and networks to drive adoption of digital services, such as AI. For BT, it marks a milestone in the delivery of our strategy for customers — to provide rock solid foundations for their digital business plans.”

Global Business Internet

Global Fabric Internet is available in increments of 1 Mbps up to 100 Gbps, burstable, and will provide greater geographical coverage than BT’s previous internet services.

It will be offered with four access points as standard, providing the diversity that underpins Global Fabric’s resilience. It will be connected to two separate PoPs within each major business district (metro area) to further ensure resilience should an individual location fail.

Global Fabric Internet is the first connectivity service available from the Global Fabric NaaS platform. Over the following year, BT will also offer Layer 2 Ethernet and IP VPN connectivity services as well as direct peering with SaaS, SASE and Internet exchanges (IXPs).

Global Fabric platform

Built from three fundamental components, Global Fabric includes a customer web portal, digital orchestration layer and a brand-new network hardware layer deployed across an international footprint spanning the world’s top cloud datacentre locations.

Uniquely, it provides observability of both access and core networks. Access networks link up individual customer locations whereas core networks interconnect central IT systems hosted across multiple clouds. By spanning both, Global Fabric allows customers to achieve the best end-to-end network performance all the way from users and devices in offices, factories and other operational sites, to the multi-cloud core where apps and digital services such as AI are hosted.

Global Fabric is deterministic. This gives customers control over the routes their workloads take as they move between clouds, enabling them not only to achieve the best network cost and performance but meet data sovereignty regulations too as they can ensure workloads remain within geographic boundaries.

Global Fabric will be available to customers internationally via 140 PoPs hosted in the world’s top cloud locations located in 40 countries. It will offer 74 per cent direct coverage of hyperscaler clouds and pre-provisioned high-bandwidth connectivity to over 700 data-centres.

Connecting to Global Fabric PoPs

Global Fabric’s core network hardware is installed in the world’s major carrier neutral facilities (CNFs) — large datacentres where cloud providers, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies and network operators provide access to their services.

Global Fabric hardware locations are known as ‘points of presence’ (PoPs). BT makes it easy for customers to connect their sites to their business partners, and to their applications and workloads hosted in the multi-cloud, using our PoPs as global connectivity gateways.

Global Fabric and sustainability — key figures

The new high-capacity, fully programmable network’s state-of-the-art equipment offers improvements in efficiency, sustainability and resilience. BT estimates that when fully rolled out, Global Fabric will use 79 per cent less electricity than its current international business networks. This means customers on the new network will be able to reduce their Scope 3 carbon emissions.