Colt Deploys 100GbE Across Europe

Colt Group (LON:COLT, news) said yesterday that it has made 100 Gigabit Ethernet available across its pan-European footprint. The deployment leverages the company’s Infinera DTN gear, which powers their infrastructure across 18,000 buildings, 20 owned data centers, and 39 metro areas.

Note, however, that it’s not the DTN-X — yet anyway. Colt is matching Interoute’s deployment last month of 100GbE via the older-but-still-disruptive 10x10G Infinera technology. What Colt and Interoute have in common, of course, is plenty of their own intercity fiber, and native 100G is still uneconomical for many cases — especially relative to Infinera’s earlier DTN products for those networks that have more fiber than they can light.

But it is interesting to note that the wholesale market for 100GbE services does seem ready to emerge, and thus we are seeing various methods of addressing it get put into place for 2013.  Colt, for example, first test-drove Infinera’s 100GbE solution two years ago, but is only now seeing the demand necessary to make it a reality.  In Europe, given the economic challenges the whole region and especially telecom has been facing, it’s nice to see the alternative operators still actively expanding their product sets, regardless.

I still like Colt as a consolidation target, but operationally their data efforts do seem ready to grow past the voice-related churn that has dominated the past few years for them.

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Categories: Fiber Networks · Telecom Equipment