The SuperNet is an important resource in Alberta. This high-speed fibre-optic and microwave network, built by the Government of Alberta in 2005, connects over 400 communities across the province. Its purpose is to serve as a digital highway, and is often the only link between some urban and rural areas, thus acting as a vital bridge for Alberta’s connectivity gaps. Most of Cybera’s members connect to Cybera’s network through the SuperNet, relying on it daily to meet their connectivity needs.
And those connectivity needs are constantly rising! Over the last several years, we’ve seen a steady increase of usage of the SuperNet.
As such, over a span of 19 months, Cybera’s network team worked to expand our connectivity to the SuperNet, ensuring we can meet and exceed the network needs of our members. But this project has involved more than just increasing capacity to our existing SuperNet connection.
Beginning in March 2023, the network team investigated different network architectures that would allow us to increase our current capacity, while continuing to easily scale that capacity for the long-term future. The team chose to implement a dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) topology in both Calgary and Edmonton. This network technology can effectively use one strand of fibre optic cable over a long distance, enabling it to function as if it were multiple strands.
This allows us to have several network connections to the SuperNet without each one requiring a dedicated fibre. (fibre can be a scarce resource, so being able to use one length of cable for multiple SuperNet connections greatly increases our ability to connect to the SuperNet.)
In both Calgary and Edmonton, the network team was able to install a DWDM multiplexer at the same SuperNet MeetMe facilities inside Bell’s central office, creating a direct point-to-point connection between Cybera and the SuperNet.
Once we had our DWDM architecture installed, we migrated our existing SuperNet connections to the new network devices. In Calgary, this included our existing five 10 Gbps (gigabits per second) SuperNet connections, and in Edmonton, four 10 Gbps connections. At this point, we reached connection parity of our existing SuperNet capacity, but over a new network architecture.
We then added an additional two 10 Gbps SuperNet ports (connections) to Calgary and three 10 Gbps SuperNet ports to Edmonton, bringing each region up to seven 10 Gbps SuperNet ports, or fourteen total, raising our total SuperNet capacity to 140 Gbps.
As a final step, we then “rebalanced” our member connections across the new SuperNet ports, allowing our members’ daily network traffic to continue to naturally grow with the increased capacity.
In order to rebalance our connections, we had to work with each migrated member to coordinate a maintenance window between them and Bell. We’d like to thank each of these members, as well as Bell, for their time and flexibility with these moves.
On October 15, 2024, we completed the last migration, officially completing our 19-month expansion project. We’re very proud of what our team has accomplished and we’re excited to see what the future holds for increasing network usage. With our new architecture in place, we’re currently able to support 140 Gbps of SuperNet traffic, with the ability to increase to upwards of 480 Gbps, ensuring we will meet the needs of our members. We also hope to explore the ability to aggregate multiple SuperNet connections as well as automating the management and balancing of our members across our SuperNet connections in the future, making our connectivity to the SuperNet even more efficient.