U.K.-based telecom giant BT recently tied its Global Fabric network-as-a-service (Naas) platform to Digital Reality carrier neutral facilities, extending the operator’s efforts in meeting global enterprise networking needs. That move continues BT’s push toward integrating SD-WAN types of data traffic path control into an underlying network.

BT rolled out its Global Fabric platform in October. The NaaS platform is designed to provide enterprise customers with access to a global networking footprint and marketplace where they can select pre-integrated cloud and networking services that they pay for on an as-needed basis.

The latest expansion adds routing through Digital Reality’s facilities, which currently number more than 300 locations in more than 25 countries. BT customers will now be able to select from those Digital Reality facilities to store our route their data.

Colin Bannon, CTO for BT Business, told SDxCentral that Global Fabric is architected to provide the most direct route for customer data traffic between public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. He said this includes building points of presence (PoPs) in hyperscaler locations.

“We're actually building our PoPs in those local zones, which the hyperscalers love and our customers love because then you have this extension of your data center LAN fabric because your apps are now distributed in multiple locations,” Bannon said of this architecture. “What was a monolithic app in a data center fabric, the wide-area network is performing that data center fabric function and that's the approach that we take: great programmability, great observability, great micro-segmentation and security, and great control and visibility across every node in that fabric just like you did in the data center.”

Bannon also noted this architecture can support data in transit sovereignty, which he calls “the paradox of the internet.” He described this as the internet being designed to be location or routing agnostic, which is great for resiliency but a challenge for enterprises that want more control over how their data and network traffic is routed.

“One of the things that we wanted to solve for is the concept of data sovereignty, of data in motion,” Bannon said. “But how do you reconcile the internet, which was designed to survive – to reroute and survive – a nuclear war and it'll just find other routes to get around?”

This is an increasingly contentious issue due to growing geopolitical concerns and regulations and something Bannon said current SD-WAN systems can’t solve for.

“SD-WAN has no control of the underlay,” Bannon said. “SD-WAN does have path control, but only on the first hop. What we're now offering is business-intent path control for every hop of the journey.”

BT is a big player in the SD-WAN space, working with a number of vendors to provide managed services. This includes VMware, Cisco, Nokia Nuage, Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet.

Vertical Systems Group ranked BT Global Services as the No. 4 global provider of carrier-managed SD-WAN services for 2022, based on market share outside of their home market. This was just behind market leaders AT&T, Orange Business and Verizon.

Bannon said BT is taking advantage of that presence along with the company’s broader network updates and Global Fabric offering to solve challenges for the “next five or 10 years.” This includes using path control closed-loop remediation to make the network more geographically aware and able to control more than just the first “hop.”

“What we've done is connected the dots,” Bannon said. “We’ve made the nodes geographically aware and therefore you have a lot more use cases that you can serve and start to ask the question: Why do you need SD-WAN if it's one hop versus something that can control all the hops?”

This move can also unlock deeper enterprise outcomes like cost reduction and tuned service support. This involves putting business intent on the network underlay “to go lowest cost path, lowest latency path, lowest packet-loss path, lowest reconvergence time.”

“We've really doubled down on hard engineering from the ground up,” Bannon said of BT’s efforts. “A lot of our peers are doing brilliant engineering, but what they're doing is around the digital interface on the old network or SD-WAN overlays on top of the old network. We see very few providers that are shutting down their own network and building from the ground up, what is essentially the 3.0 of what networking is, which is incredibly hard. It's not easy because it's big engineering. You only do this once every 10 or 20 years.”