Pacnet, Comcast, and DANICE Get 100G Upgrades

The economics may still be borderline, but 100G upgrades plans are starting to sprout up all over the place. This week the USA’s largest cable operator and two submarine cable operators took the 100G upgrade plunge, although one of those cables will initially dabble at 40G.

Comcast has selected Ciena’s newest 100G technology to power its intercity network. They have dark fiber across most of the country much of which is courtesy of Level 3, and will be adding Ciena’s WaveLogic 3 to its existing 6500 Packet-Optical installation. That will also give them the ability to scale up to 400G later on.

In the Pacific, Pacnet is also upgrading to 100G. They’ll be deploying an optical mesh network with integrated OTN switching on their EAC-C2C regional submarine cable system. The upgrade is planned to begin in early 2013, but the gear involved wasn’t mentioned. Pacnet got a new CEO over the summer, with Bill Barney getting an old fashioned heave-ho.

And in the North Atlantic, DANICE is getting Ciena’s coherent technology as well. Farice and Ciena are upgrading the Denmark-Iceland cable to 40g/100g, aiming to provide bigger pipes for Iceland’s growing data center market. DANICE will initially use 40G waves on its 2295km, 4 fiber system, with ultra-long distance 100G waves to be deployed later this year. At full capacity, that will provide some 35.2Tbps to Iceland’s 320,000 people – that’s just over 100Mbps of raw dedicated bandwidth per person, which is nowhere enough right? Hah!

If you haven't already, please take our Reader Survey! Just 3 questions to help us better understand who is reading Telecom Ramblings so we can serve you better!

Categories: Cable · Internet Traffic · Undersea cables