NFWare Delivers Industry First 400Gbps CGNAT Server to UK-based ISP YouFibre

NFWare today announced it has deployed the industry’s first 400 Gbps virtual carrier grade network address translation (vCGNAT) servers to its customer YouFibre, a fast-growing UK-based internet service provider (ISP).

This vCGNAT performance utilized four 100GbE network interface cards (NIC) and is double the previous fastest server. This throughput is a result of performance improvements in the latest version of NFWare’s vCGNAT software and the use of tuned Intel^® Xeon^® Scalable Processor-based servers.

Founded in 2019 in Tewkesbury, United Kingdom, YouFibre brings ultrafast Internet to its customers based on full fiber access and backbone networks. The company primarily uses fiber network services from its sister company Netomnia, a fiber-optic networking company.

NFWare’s addressing infrastructure allows YouFibre to continue its fast growth. In June 2024, the ISP announced it had doubled its subscribers to 100,000 in just nine months. With that fast growth comes a need for IPv4 addresses for each new customer. But given the shortage and high cost of IPv4 addresses, YouFibre is growing its business using NFWare CGNAT to ensure it has the IP addresses it needs for growth.

YouFibre has installed 400Gbps vCGNAT at three of its highest volume points of presence (PoPs) and has 200 Gbps NFWare vCGNAT servers at less busy sites. The servers are based on 36-core, 2.4GHz Intel^® Xeon^® Platinum 8360Y CPUs. NFWare engineers consulted with YouFibre to tune the servers including using non-uniform memory access (NUMA) to ensure fastest possible memory access for the CPUs. Each server features eight 100GbE connections provided by four Mellanox Connect X6 network adapters.

For an operator whose traffic is that high it is convenient to have just one 400Gbps server instead of several. It is easier to manage, there is no need to balance traffic between servers, and it is more cost-effective because only one server is needed.