Egnatia Odos Highway is the largest motorway in Greece with a length of 670 Km and is part of the European route E90. It begins from Igoumenitsa and ends at the Greek Turkish border at Kipous in Thraki. Egnatia Odos has 177 large bridges of a total length of 42 km, 73 tunnels of maximum length 4,8km and a total length of over 50 km, 350 under & overpasses and 63 ICs and semi-I/Cs, 43 river crossings and 11 railway crossings.

Based on the need to network the new toll stations being constructed during the last year, “Egnatia Odos SA” proceeded to the deployment of a new backbone network. The new network is called “egnatiaNET” and uses the existing fiber optic cables. The new network connects 106 POI (Points Of Interest) along the main motorway (“Hgoymenitsa” port – “Kipoi” Border Station) and the three vertical axes which connect Egnatia motorway with the Greek – Albanian borders, Greek – North Macedonian borders and Greek – West Boulgarian borders.

NewALERT in cooperation with AKTOR SA prepared the study and implemented the new network.

The new network is based on Cisco core equipment (routers/switches) and Cisco & DELL access switches. The core part uses 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology, while the access and distribution part use 1 Gigabit Ethernet technology. Failover solutions are used with redundant hardware and ring topologies. In particular “egnatiaNET” is comprised of 24 10GbE nodes and 19 1GbE rings for access and distribution. In summary 249 devices were used, to interconnect 106 Points Of Interest (30 Interchanges, 19 Main Toll Plazas, 40 Ramp Toll Plazas and 17 Tunnel/Road Control Centers and Support Buildings).

Through “Cosmote” VPN connections, “egnatiaNET” dynamically forwards traffic whenever a physical damage occurs (fiber break or node breakdown).