Synchronised Digital Hierarchy

In order to support demand for increased mobile capacity, Kordia completed a major Synchronised Digital Hierarchy (SDH) fibre network upgrade project throughout Australia’s major capital cities.

While the project presented significant challenges, work was completed within budget and timeframe and most importantly not one call was dropped.

The network was to be upgraded from 2.5 Gbits/s to 10 Gbits/s rings in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide. This entailed drafting an intricate and detailed design for installing high capacity nodes and integrating them into the live SDH fibre network.

From logistics and detailed design through to installation, commissioning and testing of new equipment to ensure a seamless upgrade, Kordia was able to provide a turnkey solution.

“Kordia was selected due to its excellent knowledge of the Vodafone network, its nationwide engineering support network and the synergies between this project and expertise of its other Vodafone transmission capacity projects,” says Richard Street, Kordia Engineering Manager, Telecommunications Projects.

“Upgrading a live network is as delicate as performing heart surgery,” says Street. “It involves careful manipulation of circuits and concurrent traffic migration to ensure connectivity is maintained between the fibre rings and the network. Timing is absolutely crucial in ensuring there is no disruption to the network.”

In some instances, Kordia had to re-use Vodafone’s existing dark fibre, meaning the team had to migrate traffic and re-arrange areas of network to free up dark fibre segments; these were subsequently used to setup the new 10Gbits/s rings. As previously alluded to, the traffic migrations and network re-arrangements were done all without a single call being dropped.

Additionally, Kordia also completed the design for Vodafone’s Brisbane Core SDH Network upgrade, and installation and integration was finished in March 2009.