Dark Fibre
Your own fibre. Your own equipment. Your own rules.
A strand of glass between two points — and nothing else in the way
Most connectivity services are "lit" — the carrier owns the fibre, plugs in their own transmission equipment at each end, and sells you a managed product with a fixed speed and feature set. Dark fibre is the opposite. We lease you the raw fibre pair between two of your sites (or between you and a data centre, or between you and another carrier), unlit. You decide what to light it with, how fast to run it, and what to do with it.
The fibre is physically dedicated to you — never shared, never overbooked, never reshaped by someone else's traffic engineering. If you can engineer it, the fibre will carry it.
Why organisations choose dark fibre
Capacity that scales with you
Start at 10 Gbps today. Move to 100 Gbps next year. Layer in 400 Gbps channels with DWDM when you need them. The fibre itself never changes — only the optics at each end. No forklift upgrades, no contract renegotiations, no waiting on someone else's roadmap.
Privacy by physics
Your traffic never touches a shared switch, a shared circuit, or another customer's VLAN. It's a dedicated glass path from A to B. For regulated industries, sovereign data requirements and high-assurance workloads, that physical separation is worth more than any encryption key.
Latency you control
No carrier hops, no queueing, no buffer bloat from someone else's traffic. Just the speed of light down a single glass strand. We publish the route and the physical length so you know the latency floor before you order.
What our customers put on their fibre
- Data-centre interconnect — your DR site lit at line-rate 100 Gbps
- Carriers extending their own MPLS, DWDM or IP networks into Cambridge
- Storage replication with no WAN overhead — iSCSI, NVMe-oF, Fibre Channel
- Research facilities moving HPC or genomics datasets between sites
- Broadcast and post-production contribution links — uncompressed video
- Financial-services connectivity where latency is measured in microseconds
- Private metro rings for campus and multi-building estates
- Sovereign and regulated workloads that must never traverse shared infrastructure
How we deliver dark fibre
Design
We plan routes ourselves, across our own duct network where it exists and through carefully chosen partners where it doesn't. You get a published map of the path, measured optical loss figures, and — where you want it — a fully diverse second route for A/B resilience.
Build
Our own field engineers splice, patch and commission the circuit. We OTDR-test every strand, hand you the loss-budget report, and terminate on the connector of your choice (LC, SC, E2000 or bespoke) in your rack, your meet-me-room, or our handoff panel.
Operate
Once lit, the fibre is yours — but the glass is still ours to look after. Every circuit includes 24/7 UK-based NOC monitoring of the physical path, same-day response for cable events and a named field engineer you can call.
Built to enterprise standards
Every dark fibre circuit is bespoke
Pricing depends on route length, build complexity, diversity, and contract term. We do not publish a list price because no two routes are the same — but we do publish a clear methodology and we will give you a fixed quote, with a detailed route plan and loss budget, within five working days of an enquiry.
Available on monthly rental, multi-year terms (typically 3, 5 or 10 years) or as an IRU for the full economic life of the asset. Talk to us about what fits your balance sheet.
Let's design your route
Tell us the two endpoints, your capacity and resilience requirements, and any specific handoff or diversity needs. Our design team will come back with a route plan, loss budget and fixed quote within five working days.