Nokia and Fibrus announce five-year deal for Nokia Deepfield solution

Fibrus is a UK alternative network operator (altnet) bringing Full Fibre broadband to rural and underserved communities across Northern Ireland and Cumbria. By April 2025 it had connected over 100,000 customers and delivered fiber connectivity to almost 400,000 premises — transforming areas where speeds had been measured in single-digit megabits.

With FTTH take-up running at 50 percent and 2 Gbps services in the field, Fibrus needed sharper visibility into the traffic flowing across its expanding network — and a way to absorb DDoS attacks before they reached subscribers. Because Fibrus uses carrier-grade NAT, a single attack on one shared IP address could affect dozens of customers at once, making automated detection and mitigation a priority rather than a nice-to-have.

Fibrus has been a Nokia customer since 2020, when it selected Nokia to deliver fiber access to some of the hardest-to-reach communities in Northern Ireland. The Deepfield agreement extends that relationship into a unified access-and-assurance architecture for the next phase of the build.

Following a successful trial, Fibrus signed a five-year agreement to deploy the Nokia Deepfield solution across its network — combining Deepfield Defender for DDoS detection and mitigation with Deepfield Cloud Intelligence for traffic analytics.

Defender applies AI-driven detection and automated mitigation to neutralize attacks in seconds, removing the need for manual operator intervention. Cloud Intelligence provides continuous, granular visibility into the traffic flowing through Fibrus's infrastructure — including insight into the content sources driving the heaviest demand and the patterns that inform peering and capacity decisions.

Deepfield integrates with Fibrus's existing Nokia FTTH access infrastructure, giving the operator a single, software-defined view of access, traffic, and security — and a foundation that scales with the next round of upgrades, including 25G, 50G, and 100G PON technologies.

The Nokia Deepfield deployment delivers:

• Automated DDoS detection and mitigation, neutralizing attacks with minimal operator intervention
• Deeper visibility into traffic patterns across Fibrus's growing network
• Stronger protection for CG NAT subscribers, where a single shared address can otherwise expose tens of customers to a single attack
• Data to support direct peering and content-provider conversations, helping reduce transit costs and improve user experience
• Streamlined regulatory reporting with the level of network-level insight UK regulators require
• Cost-effective scalability for future broadband expansion, including 25G, 50G, and 100G PON technologies

With Deepfield, Fibrus has the visibility and control to keep service quality high as its network grows — protecting subscribers, optimizing peering economics, and freeing engineering capacity for the next stage of the rollout.