Vodafone adds 33 PoPs in Americas, deepens MPLS network reach

Vodafone is increasing its presence in the Americas region to better serve its large multinational corporation (MNC) customers by adding 21 new points of presence (PoPs) in North America and 12 in South America and Latin America.

By adding these new network locations, Vodafone says it will have a global MPLS-enabled network that will eventually connect a total of 212 PoPs across Europe, Asia, Africa, Middle East and the Americas. All of these locations will be in locations close to Vodafone's major enterprise customer sites, high-density populations and data center locations.

As part of this expansion effort, the service provider says it will connect over 67 countries directly, rising to over 150 countries by establishing interconnection agreements with various network partners.

Over this network, Vodafone will be able to further extend its growing suite of IP-VPN, Ethernet and Internet access services to enterprise customers. Being an IP-based network, it can also support a business client's transition to unified communications and cloud computing.

Chuck Pol, Vodafone Global Enterprise President of the Americas region, told FierceTelecom that this latest expansion effort fills a gap it had in its global coverage footprint.

What this means is that customers that purchase services in other regions like Asia-Pacific, Africa, and Europe, will be able to take advantage of newly extended capabilities in the U.S. market.

"In dealing with our customers on a global basis, we had huge capabilities in Asia, Africa, and the European market, but we had a gap in what we're providing to our customers existed in the U.S.," Pol said. "While we had nine points of presence here before we made this announcement, we're going to expand to up to 30 in the U.S., but we won't stop there because it will be a success-based model."

Pol added that they "identified 14,000-15,000 offices plus main data center clusters where our customers are as well as ISP locations and we kind of mapped those locations."

Already, Vodafone's efforts are paying off with a number of its large MNC customers taking advantage of the service provider's expanded capabilities.

"We had one customer that recently ordered in six countries and five links back to their data centers here in the U.S. and that was before we even built them," Pol. "We're in the process of building to suit to make sure we can deliver to the customer's requirements and most of those 30 points of presence in the U.S. will be done by the middle to the end of March."  

This latest network build advances the network presence it gained when it purchased Cable and Wireless Worldwide in 2012. That acquisition immediately deepened its UK-based fiber network that it uses for wireless backhaul in its mobile business and serving MNCs.

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This article was updated on Oct. 3 with quotes from Chuck Pol, Global Enterprise President of the Americas region for Vodafone.