BT today announced it has switched on Global Fabric, its new, transformative network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform and has been carrying out extensive live testing over the past two months. The first Global Fabric services will launch in early 2025.

Global Fabric will make it easier and quicker for businesses to securely connect employees, customers and devices to apps and digital services — including artificial intelligence (AI) — that are hosted across multiple clouds.

Customers will benefit from scalable, secure, high-capacity and resilient connectivity, ready to meet the growing and complex demands of breakthrough AI technologies. Global Fabric’s flexibility will be unprecedented. With legacy networks, setting up or making changes to connectivity services can take weeks. With Global Fabric, it happens in an instant, helping businesses manage unpredictable, AI-driven spikes in data traffic.

BT has already installed Global Fabric ‘points of presence’ (PoPs) in over 45 of the world’s major cloud data centres with the number increasing to 140. This offers customers a choice of locations from which to access Global Fabric services to suit their operational, market and regulatory needs.

Customers that do not have network connections into the cloud data centres hosting Global Fabric PoPs will be able to order new links from BT, ensuring they are ready for the launch of live services in early 2025.

BT is also rolling out a demo of Global Fabric’s digital management portal. By November, this will allow customers’ IT teams to learn how to set up and optimise their multi-cloud network configurations and experiment with application programmable interfaces (APIs). APIs will help customers integrate Global Fabric connectivity into other digital business platforms and apps to boost innovation and growth.

“BT’s Global Fabric will help customers hit the cloud running,” said Colin Bannon, chief technology officer, BT Business. “It will give them a choice of the world’s best cloud locations to interconnect with their customers, partners and suppliers, making them easier to do business with not just today but tomorrow too. With the achievement of our latest Global Fabric delivery milestones, we take another step closer to a new age of AI-ready, digital interconnectivity.”

Connecting to Global Fabric PoPs

Global Fabric’s core network hardware is installed in the world’s major carrier neutral facilities (CNFs) — large datacentres where cloud providers, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies and network operators provide access to their services.

Global Fabric hardware locations are known as ‘points of presence’ (PoPs). BT makes it easy for customers to connect their sites to their business partners, and to their applications and workloads hosted in the multi-cloud, using our PoPs as global connectivity gateways.