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

Despite significant challenges, not one call was dropped and work was completed within budget and timeframe.

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

Kordia provided a turnkey solution, from logistics and detailed design through to installation, commissioning and testing of new equipment to ensure a seamless upgrade.

“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 cases, Kordia had to re-use Vodafone’s existing dark fibre, which meant that the team had to migrate traffic and re-arrange parts of network to free up dark fibre segments that were later used to setup the new 10Gbits/s rings. Traffic migrations and network re-arrangements were done without dropping a single call.

Kordia has also completed the design for the Brisbane Core SDH Network upgrade for Vodafone, and installation and integration was completed by March 2009.