Windstream’s plans for its next generation optical backbone became a bit clearer yesterday with the choice of vendor. They have tapped Ciena’s coherent optical gear and software platforms to power the company’s ‘National Converged Optical Network’ project.
Windstream’s NCON will connect cities, landing stations, and gateways across its footprint with pipes of up to 800Gbps. Over the last few years, the company has added dark fiber routes out to the west coast, finally completing a fully national infrastructure portfolio. Ciena’s Waveserver 5 platform, WaveLogic 5 Extreme, 6500 RLS, MCP comain controller, and Liquid Spectrum analytics will all play a role in the nextgen upgrade. The roll out will start this quarter.
Windstream had been working with Ciena’s Blue Planet SDN/NFV platforms for a while, but for some time its optical provider has been Infinera, with whom they did a successful 800G/700G demo earlier this summer. This win for Ciena does seem like it may have come at Infinera’s expense, although there will surely be plenty of the latter’s gear in Windstream’s infrastructure either way.
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