B4RN 400G Juniper Upgrade

B4RN is the community-led broadband company delivering some of the fastest services around rural Lancashire and surrounding area (coverage map here), mostly using farmland to lay fibre. It was one of the first community projects, certainly at scale, which delivered better services to many hard-to-reach places than many of us can get in cities. We recently features them as one of the providers that promoted social tariffs alongside regular packages, instead of burying them in difficult-to-find menus like some competitors.

B4RN’s residential package is £33/month for a 1Gbps service whilst its 10Gbps service is £150/month. The network operator has announced an increase of its bacckbone ring network from 40 to 400Gbps around the entire ring, massively increasing capacity for general expansion, and increasing uptake of faster services. It will be doing this using Juniper Networks MX304 routers to facilitate 400G aggregation. The MX304 roter can provide up to telve 400G ports (or more likely a mixture with 100Gbps and 40Gbps ports). Its network is entirely underground not using any telegraph poles which it claims means it fares well in bad weather.

“The Juniper router is powerful but fits into a regional utility cabinet, so we can bring really fast internet to our
rural communities.

By connecting the backbone in a ring formation, so that every core device has a North/South (or East/West) path back to the main datacentres, including the datacentres themselves, we will gain a greater level of resilience and redundancy. This will allow hard down circuit events to happen, to get repaired and resolved, with next to zero customer impact. It will also
allow for maintenance, repair and upgrades to happen on any network segment without loss of service to our customers. We can also then onboard B2B customers who wish to take advantage of the high capacity, highly available and low latency core with confidence that their service has a level of physical resilience for service loss protection.”

Tom Rigg, CEO, B4RN

We hope that any cabinets these routers are housed in are secure as MX304s are not cheap. When Juniper announced the retirement of the MX204 (a decision they later reversed), many service providers found very few options due to the cost of the MX304.

B4RN have launched a video to talk about the network and how they work:

(clicking the video above will play on YouTube)