UUNET, a global leader in Internet communications solutions, has announced that it plans to increase its Internet capacity in Scotland from 4 Mbps to 16 Mbps. This is part of a £2 million investment by UUNET in the UK regions, to enable businesses in the area to transport more data across the Internet faster. The improvement to the Edinburgh Internet data centre, which is housed close to the city centre, is to meet the rapidly growing needs of Scotland for higher capacity Internet access by providing faster connection to the UUNET international network backbone.
Scottish businesses will be able to make greater use of the Internet to streamline working practices. Enterprises already benefit from improved communication and information sharing via email, file transfers and interactive World Wide Web sites. In fact, almost two-thirds of Scottish businesses currently have access to email, a figure that is exceeded only by the USA.
Increasingly, more commercial transactions and activities are taking place over the Internet. Future developments will include fax, voice services and conferencing over the Internet. All of these depend on high capacity network access.
UUNET's investment will provide Scottish businesses with the scope for expansion. Many enterprises start Internet business with a dial up connection but develop to use leased or fixed lines. These provide higher capacity, 24 hour a day services and suit typical corporate internal LANs (networks).
The Edinburgh data centre (known as a PoP - Point of Presence) will have the extra capacity or headroom to cope with the growing number of local businesses that will come online. This will help support the region's continuing growth as a major industrial centre, by allowing it to now offer a more reliable exchange for transporting information and communications data to its existing business community and future investors alike.
The project is being carried out by the UK operating company of UUNET, formerly known as UUNET PIPEX.
Richard Heyes, UK managing director, UUNET, said: "With companies recognising the benefits of basing their business in Scotland, it is obvious that reliable and adequate Internet capacity is required to sustain the growth in new business which the region is experiencing.
"By bringing high capacity access to the Internet directly to the region, UUNET can accommodate the increasing and sophisticated online needs of business in Scotland, from a community that, for example, currently boasts five of the top eight computer manufacturers, who are producing nearly 80% of all Europe's workstations and 51% of Europe's notebooks in the area."
Technical Details
UUNET is upgrading its Edinburgh PoP, by installing two new 8 Mega/bits per second (Mbps) data links to the rest of the UUNET network. This will enable it to offer Scottish-based businesses dedicated leased line connections of up to two Mbps to the Internet.
This is part of the company's overall investment in its network worldwide. This includes a ten-fold increase over the past year in its US to UK capacity (from 45 Mbps to a total of 645 Mbps) and a seven-fold increase, over the past six months, in the size of its European network (from 400 Mbps to 3000 Mbps). During the same period, UUNET also increased its London to Europe capacity by over 350% (from 159 Mbps to 567 Mbps).
By implementing these increases, UUNET aims to develop the most reliable, widely deployed Internet network. In Europe, this network now provides direct connections to London from Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt, Monaco, Milan, Stockholm and Zurich. Further increases to the overall capacity are planned for the future.
