5 May 2015

Midcontinent deploys Infinera's network platform

Infinera Corp of Sunnyvale, CA, USA, a vertically integrated manufacturer of digital optical network systems incorporating its own indium phosphide-based photonic integrated circuits (PICs), says that Midcontinent Communications has deployed its DTN-X packet optical transport networking platform in its Upper Midwest service area of the USA to deliver cable television, high-speed Internet and telecom services to its customers.

As one of the USA's largest independent telecom companies (with more than 300,000 residential and business customers in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin), Midcontinent operates one of the largest and most resilient optical networks in the region, a 7800 fiber-mile network delivering services to urban and rural areas.

As demand for triple-play network services increases, Midcontinent has experienced rapid increases in customer traffic and expects demand to continue to grow. The DTN-X platform enables it to deliver capacity with 100Gb/s coherent transmission today using 500Gb/s super-channels, with a forward-scale design to support in-service migration to terabit super-channels in the future. The high-capacity super-channels are enabled by 500Gb/s photonic integrated circuits developed and fabricated by Infinera, which claims to be the only supplier delivering 500Gb/s of transmission capacity from a single line-card. PICs enable the DTN-X platform to integrate dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) super-channel transmission with 5Tb/s of non-blocking optical transport network switching today, and 12Tb/s in the future. Infinera says that the result is seamless scaling for Midcontinent as traffic requirements grow in the future.

"As we enhanced our network, we once again selected Infinera because we had already realized the benefits from our existing Intelligent Transport Network with the DTN platform," says Midcontinent's VP of technology Jon Pederson. "The DTN-X was easy to install. It took our team only three weeks to deploy services, allowing Midcontinent to offer services quickly to customers," he comments. 

Tags: Infinera PIC InP

Visit: www.infinera.com