Active equipment for fibre networks – time, quality and convenience

About the company and the mission
Commsworld found CTS back in 2019, when looking for a media converter. Yet still thinking this was the solution, they came across the products of CTS and realized the need was satisfied. No need for a media converter – CTS’s Power over Ethernet product IPS-3106 turned out to be the missing part in Commsworld’s assortment.

This case turned out to be a collaboration consisting of time saving, quality and convenience, which led to exceeded expectations on CTS’s products.


Commsworld is Scotland’s biggest, indigenous network operator and telecommunications provider. They are headquartered in Edinburgh, Scotland and have been in the industry for about 28 years. Commsworld used to be an inter electric provider until they entered the IP-market, acquired the network Fluency and the rest is history, hand in hand with CTS.

Customer

Commsworld

Industry

Network and telecommunication

Products and services

IPS-3106, FOS-5112, FOS-5128 and FOS-5152

The mission
Commsworld uses the CTS product in a particularly important case: the public sector. Nick Ryce, Head Of Network Operations at Commsworld, emphasizes the collaboration and that the improvement the solution provides is considerable, both for the customer and themselves:

“Our customers have never had a single failure with the IPS. Not even once. The service provided to our public sector customer, is robust and stable. The products from CTS and our implementation here, facilitates the day-to-day work for our customer in a contemporary way. ”

The core component in Commsworlds offer to the public sector was a CCTV Platform. However, Commsworld did not have the right HW products in their portfolio for the solution. Fortunately, CTS and Commsworld tend to be nothing but a perfect business match when met at the fair Connected Britain in 2019.

Since Commsworld required a small and robust Ethernet switch with at least four PoE copper ports facing customer parts, we introduced Commsworld to our ruggedised product IPS-3106. A small, high quality product – which can be installed in a multitude of places due to the minimal size. The item would mainly be deployed in street cabinets across the UK to be used as Ethernet demarcation devices for the cities ”Pure Fiber Street Access” connections – for CCTV and UTC (Urban Traffic Control) applications. 

Commsworld even managed to install the CTS product in lamp posts because of its small size. Other features came into use as well, such as the simple yet so robust VLAN manipulation capabilities. Critical when being used as an Ethernet Demarcation Device to facilitate service segregation in an MEF-style carrier deployment. The PoE capabilities meant that our CTS device could power the customer equipment as well, such as CCTV cameras and Wi-Fi access points.

Not to be blinded by the small size and high quality, Nick Ryce explained another value being decisive to them:

“With CTS’s products, we are saving time. Imagine calling an engineer to drive from one city to another to fix or troubleshoot an issue. This could be reality. With the remote access capabilities of the CTS product our engineers are able to begin diagnostics within minutes of any issues being reports. We are seeing resolution timescales within 15-20 minutes of being reported. I can not see we would find this anywhere else.”

At CTS I got both, Nick says. He discusses the software and the hardware with one person, not two different people as could be the case with another partner. Commsworld means this is a unique value – which brings convenience in having CTS as a supplier.  

Since 2019, Commsworld has successfully deployed several hundred of our switches into Scottish Local Authorities such as Glasgow City Council and Renfrewshire Council. Commsworld also used our devices to help create Scotland’s first “Smart Park” in Glasgow Green, delivering a platform to support Public Wi-Fi and IoT applications. This infrastructure provided high-capacity connectivity to the Host Broadcaster for the UEFA 2020 Fan Zone, hosted in Glasgow. 

This case makes Commsworld one of CTS’s largest industrial customers. Due to this, Commsworld has been able to try other products from CTS’s assortment: (FOS-5128 & FOS-5152) within Access Edge infrastructure. So far another success.