NEWS
Vodafone
Gigafast
Broadband
now live
in 15 towns
and cities
across the UK
Cinesite Studios and
Qumulo keep the
entertainment flowing
Vodafone has extended its Gigafast
Broadband rollout to Birmingham,
Bristol and Liverpool, meaning Gigabit
speed broadband is now available in 15
towns and cities and is set to become
available in three million homes and
businesses across the UK over the
next year.
The news also means Vodafone’s Gigafast
Broadband service is now live on multiple
infrastructure partners.
The new cities follow a commercial deal
signed with Openreach, the country’s
largest network infrastructure provider,
in November 2019.
The service will initially be available to
360,000 premises across the three cities
expanding to over 500,000 premises
by mid-2021 as Openreach extends its
infrastructure. Meanwhile, 12 other towns
and cities are part of an existing agreement
with CityFibre.
Unlike most home broadband services
based on old telephone lines, Vodafone’s
full-fibre broadband uses all optical-fibre
cables at every stage of the connection.
This gives users download speeds of up to
900Mbps, which is 14 times faster than
the average fixed broadband service in
the UK.
Residents and businesses across these
cities will now be able to enjoy fast
connectivity like never before and a
reliable broadband connection.
Alongside Vodafone Gigafast Broadband,
customers who have a Vodafone 5G
smartphone across Birmingham, Bristol and
Liverpool are already enjoying a fast and
seamless mobile data performance.
Qumulo, a leading provider of cloud
file data services, has announced
that Cinesite Studios, a global
producer of special effects and feature
animation, has selected Qumulo’s
file software to support its extensive
rendering workloads.
Cinesite is a leading digital
entertainment studio with credits
including the Avengers, the James Bond
movie franchises, The Witcher, Locke
and Key and Raising Dion television
shows. Cinesite’s award-winning, 500
employee-strong visual effects and
animation team brings filmmakers’
visions to life, from offices across
London, Montreal, Berlin, Munich,
Vancouver and, increasingly, from
employees’ homes.
Rendering performance is critical
to meeting delivery deadlines for
Cinesite’s customers and requires
real time collaboration. When a new
computer-generated (CG) feature
film needed immediate rendering
capacity, Cinesite had to ramp up
production capacity and feed data into
applications, while storing large format
digital content securely in the cloud. By
deploying and connecting Cinesite’s
applications to Qumulo, Cinesite was
able to meet the needs of remote artists
and staff without impacting production
quality or timelines.
Cinesite utilised the Qumulo solution
across multiple Amazon Web Services
(AWS) Availability Zones, ensuring
consistent performance for artists and
staff dispersed geographically, while
leveraging high-performance storage at
scale. Cinesite also required seamless
integration between its on-prem and
AWS deployments, and Qumulo quickly
optimised EFS instances and replicated
the data between on-prem and AWS. •
20 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com