Interoute, Infinera Demo 100G Subsea, While Verizon Goes 100GE

Interoute and Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) took another step into the 100G era with a successful demonstration of the latter’s 5x100Gbps photonic integrated circuits.  The coherent 100Gbps channels were transmitted on fiber with 20x10Gbps of live traffic.  The route was from Amsterdam to London and then back again, totaling 940km with a 210km unrepeatered undersea segment across the North Sea in the middle.  The demo, went off without a hitch, naturally, else we wouldn’t have seen a PR – haha.  Of course, those 5x100Gbps PICs aren’t commercially available yet, that is scheduled for next year I believe.

Interoute has been one of Infinera’s highest profile customers for several year, and it looks like the relationship will survive the 100G transition.  Their pan-European footprint has been making inroads into the outsourcing game with various PTTs, including recent announcements by Telefonica and KPN.  If that trend continues, Interoute is definitely going to need those larger building blocks to keep everything manageable.

Meanwhile, Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) has also been busy with 100G in Europe.  They announced today that they have in fact implemented the first standards-based, multi-vendor 100GE on its longhaul backbone.  The route is the one they’ve been doing all such initial 100G work, i.e. on the 893km of fiber between Paris and Frankfurt.  By multi-vendor they mean Juniper routers and Ciena 100G coherent transport.

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Categories: Internet Backbones · Telecom Equipment · Undersea cables