Case Study: The Switch Taps Net Insight for Build of 100G Network

The Switch has extended its multi-year partnership with Net Insight to build 100G network capacity across North America simultaneously integrated with new cloud-based production and transmission service MIMiC.

The Brief
To meet rising demand for more flexible production and distribution services, including remote production, The Switch embarked on a significant expansion of its production network. Specifically, the service provider wanted to create a new 100Gbit fiber network, bringing higher capacity connectivity to key media and sports hubs in the North American market. To further facilitate evolving customer models, The Switch launched MIMiC, an on-demand cloud-based production and transmission service leveraging the broadcast quality redundancy of its underlying fiber network with the transmission powered by Nimbra Edge.

The Network Core
For over a decade The Switch has operated an extensive domestic private fiber network built on Net Insight Nimbra. This consists of more than 50 primary nodes and a further 500+ connections into customer sites at broadcasters and rights holders, playout centers, major venues and stadia.

The main nodes comprise of Nimbra chassis, communications equipment, in band and out of band control and an SDI router which supports local HD loops out to the customer when required.

Supplementing the 10Gbit infrastructure are a series of fully fledged flight-based nodes, again based on Nimbra. The Switch ships these nationally and internationally to events (like Roland Garros in Paris) where the ‘PoP in a Box’ simply connect into The Switch’s infrastructure.

“Net Insight’s Nimbra equipment has been at the center of our ability to deliver seamless feeds to our customers for many years,” says Robert Szabo-Rowe, The Switch’s Senior Vice President of Engineering and Product Management. “Nimbra is our Swiss Army knife. It supports all the main broadcast formats. We are able to manage it remotely so we don’t have to rely on local support or local connectivity in order to have full visibility into metrics and configuration. That’s really important when you have as many of these units deployed as we do.”

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