Infinera Makes European Inroads at Teliasonera, Details Vision

Today, Infinera paired a key expanded customer deployment with a release of the vendor’s networking vision for the rapidly approaching ‘Terabit Era’.

Following its deployment of the DTN-X in the US, Teliasonera International Carrier has brought it across the Atlantic. They’ve now put it on one of their key routes, hooking up Stockholm and Hamburg with those 500G superchannels.  In the US of course, Teliasonera operates off a few fiber pairs from the WilTel buildout, but in Europe they’ve got a lot more and in Sweden they’re obviously top dog.

TeliaSonera has 100G deployed across Europe already, but with gear from Coriant (formerly NSN). The fact that they’re bringing Infinera in as well implies things have gone really well with the gear in the US, and I doubt it will be their last such move and I doubt Coriant is terribly happy about it either.

As for their vision for the future, Infinera unveiled what it calls the Intelligent Transport Network. The three main prongs of that vision are quite familiar of course: scalability, convergence, and automation.

For Infinera, scalability is of course where those 500Gbps super-channel PICs come in. Convergence brings together packet/MPLS, OTN, and ROADM technologies in order to better address the growing complexity networks are facing. And automation is the realm of SDN and related efforts to take the hands out of provisioning except at the truly bulk level.  Seems straightforward enough, but obviously putting it all together in a way that fully addresses the networking demands of the future will be on the agenda for many years to come.

The 100G marketplace has gone from nowhere to everywhere faster than I imagined it could have. And since since the DTN-X went on the market last summer, Infinera’s vision has been gaining momentum steadily right along with it.  According to an Infonetics report recently, some 86% of global service providers are now planning to deploy OTN switching and 94% of those want it integrated with WDM. That’s an environment where a lot of networks will be built (or rebuilt) from the ground up, and the land rush is clearly on to be at the foundation.

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Categories: Internet Backbones · Telecom Equipment