News

15 October 2008

 

NTNC selects Infinera for multi-state research network

The Northern Tier Network Consortium (NTNC) has selected Infinera of Sunnyvale, CA, USA to provide a Digital Optical Network for a regional optical link connecting nine states from Seattle, Washington through Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa to Chicago, Illinois.

The NTNC’s new network will be used to provide multi-wavelength networking resources to researchers at 27 member universities and to provide connectivity to the nationwide Internet2 network.

Infinera says that the NTNC chose its optical system for its flexibility in meeting the needs of the research community and its ease of service delivery. Incorporating Infinera’s indium phosphide-based photonic integrated circuits (PICs), which integrate 60 optical devices on a pair of chips each less than 5mm wide, the system provides 100Gb/s of capacity on every line card. In addition, the intelligence of Infinera’s GMPLS-powered network operating system makes it quick and easy to install and add capacity.

The NTNC includes Pacific Northwest Gigapop, which supports the network in Washington; the University of Montana and Montana State University, which support the Idaho and Montana portions; and the University of North Dakota, North Dakota State University, and North Dakota state government, which support the North Dakota portion. The NTNC network also includes capacity provided by previously announced Infinera customers SDN Networks (in South Dakota) and BOREAS-Net (which has an Infinera network spanning Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa). Last year, Internet2 completed the deployment of a nationwide Infinera network which delivers a minimum capacity of 100Gb/s to every point of presence on the Internet2 network.

“Research and education networks nationwide have found that Infinera’s photonic integration-powered Digital Optical Network is the ideal platform to support academic researchers as they develop the network applications of the future,” says the firm’s chief technology officer Drew Perkins.

At this week’s Fall 2008 Internet2 Member Meeting in New Orleans (13-16 October), Infinera is presenting a poster session on ‘Advances in Digital Optical Networking’.

Pacnet accelerates network upgrades

At the end of last month, Hong Kong- and Singapore-based Pacnet (Asia’s largest independent telecoms service provider, formed from the operational merger of Asia Netcom and Pacific Internet) said that it had selected Infinera as one of its key suppliers to enable rapid network capacity upgrades across strategic parts of its networks in Asia and USA.

Infinera says that, by deploying its Digital Optical Networking system to upgrade its backhaul networks and interconnections between its points of presence (PoPs) in these locations, Pacnet is significantly shortening service provisioning times compared to traditional dense-wave-division multiplexing (DWDM) systems. Additionally, Infinera’s solution was selected because it satisfied Pacnet’s stringent requirements with respect to reliability, GMPLS network intelligence, and scalable DWDM technologies.

“We have seen an exponential increase in the demand for intra-Asia and trans-Pacific traffic in the past 18 months, driven largely by bandwidth-intensive applications like high-definition video broadcasts and unified communications applications,” says Pacnet's chief technology officer Wilfred Kwan. “Customers often require large amounts of additional capacity at short-notice, thus we needed to build a next-generation network that is fast, responsive and able to scale up quickly.”

As part of its trans-Pacific strategy to offer additional capacity and capabilities between Asia and North America, Pacnet has also deployed Infinera’s solution to interconnect its PoPs in Los Angeles. In February, it announced its plan to build EAC Pacific, which is part of the $300m trans-Pacific Unity cable project (a 10,000km submarine cable linking Japan with the west coast of the USA).

Pacnet owns and operates EAC-C2C, Asia’s longest submarine cable network (at 36,800km), which links major Asian markets including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore (with a design capacity of 10.24Tb/s). With a comprehensive portfolio of city-to-city connectivity, data communications and IP-based solutions and services, Pacnet delivers solutions for carriers and large enterprises, as well as small/medium businesses.

With its Bandwidth Virtualization technology, Infinera systems deploy a minimum of 100Gb/s on every line card, and capacity can be quickly and flexibly deployed and reconfigured to deliver a wide variety of services. The simplicity of operations has enabled Pacnet to deliver high-bandwidth services quickly and cost-effectively to customers throughout Asia and in the USA.

Pacnet also plans to deploy Infinera’s new ILS2 line system (unveiled at June’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 08 in Philadelphia), which delivers enhanced optical reach and fiber capacity while extending the advantages of Infinera’s digital architecture, including a GMPLS-powered network operating system for operational efficiency and protection. “Service providers in Asia are seeing exponential growth in bandwidth, like their counterparts in the rest of the world,” says Infinera’s CEO Jagdeep Singh. “They share a need for flexibility, intelligence and reliability in next-generation DWDM systems,” he adds.

See related item:

Infinera PICs surpass 100m hours operation failure-free; 1 Petabit of DWDM capacity shipped

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