Decommissioning of Backbone Network Nodes

Our customer planned to remove one of their backbone fibre loops which was now redundant.

The project required Gem Engineers to visit 22 sites across the Southern UK, removing configuration details from multiple equipment cards and nodes (including Ciena Optera LH, Ciena TN16x, Ciena OC192), powering down some equipment and recovering network nodes, individual cards, thousands of fibre patch cords and 55 telecoms racks.

Clearly work of this nature is high risk, with cards being removed from live network nodes, and thousands of fibre patch cords being disconnected. All the work was carried out between midnight and 6am, with zero outages as a result of Gem's work.

During the course of the project, Gem engineers happened to be on site just after a criminal gang had been arrested in the act of breaking into the customer's (un-manned) buildings, and we co-ordinated between the customer's security group and the local police to ensure the site was made secure until the customer was able to get their own staff to site later that morning.Over the space of three weeks, Gem engineers travelled to multiple sites (22) across the South of the UK to decomission an optical backbone network that was now redundant.

Each node was decomissioned and powered down, then all the associated copper, fibre and power cabling was carefully stripped out, taking the utmost care to avoid disruption to existing services. The nodes were then removed and transported back to the client's central offices for re-configuration and re-deployment.

All the removals were carried out overnight to minimise the impact of any unplanned outages. Due to the care taken by our engineers there were no recorded incidents during the removals.

Great work from your Engineering team... Decommission, Power down the (equipment).

Great effort to remove thousands of fibers without any hits, all done in 14 days and work completed in OOH 12 to 20 hours.

Thanks to (your engineers) that was great team work and a lot of driving.

A full inventory of the recovered equipment was provided to the customer, who is now able to re-deploy it across their network.

Posted Date: 03rd Oct 2011