With the Telstra/NBN deal finally reaching the endgame, Australia’s bandwidth market has been very dynamic lately as everyone in the competitive landscape prepares for, well, a completely different competitive landscape. iiNet, one of the country’s largest alternative network operators, has decided that what its future needed was a little more bandwidth. They have been rolling out the first, but surely not the last, 100GbE deployment in the Asia-Pacific region.
At the core of the buildout are of course Juniper’s T1600 core routers, which iiNet installed at the beginning of the year and which for the last two months they have been trialing 100GbE interface cards. Considering the fact that despite all the hoopla the NBN is still more an administrative dream than an actual gigabit-to-the-home network, iiNet’s move seems a rather bold one. I hadn’t realized pricing was favorable enough for such a deployment in a country as sparsely populated as Australia.
iiNet has long been a Juniper partner of course, but a 100GbE win down under for the routing equipment giant is probably a portent of things to come. The 100GbE market doesn’t have to wait for 100G wavelengths to be economically ready for prime time, and perhaps it won’t.
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Categories: Ethernet · Internet Backbones · Telecom Equipment
Sparesely populated, but highly concentrated. 89% of the population lives in urban areas (vs 79% in the US, for example).