Interoute Goes 100G With Infinera

The pan-European fiber operator Interoute became the latest operator to take the 100G plunge in an announcement today. Their choice of gear will surprise nobody, with Infinera’s DTN-X and its 500Gbps super channels taking the prize.

Interoute has long been a customer of Infinera’s PICs, and had trialed their 100G gear early on. But despite the industry-wide rush to start deploying 100G over the past six months, they hadn’t jumped at the opportunity for a network upgrade. Like Level 3 in the US, they are sufficiently fiber rich that they could afford to wait for the economics to improve a bit further rather than rush into widespread deployments.

However, the market seems to be evolving quickly. Last fall Interoute unveiled 100Gb Ethernet over existing infrastructure, and now they’ve got the bigger pipes to go with it. Interoute has managed solid revenue and EBITDA growth for several years now in a tough environment, for which it credits much of to demand for its cloud-based ICT services.  They still look like a consolidator to me, though it’s been pretty quiet on that front lately.

As for Infinera, they report Q1 results next Wednesday.  Investors waited a long time for their DTN-X rollout, and I’m curious how things are going beyond the PRs now that they’ve had a few quarters to get sales rolling.  Of course, it’s still early in the 100G lifecycle.

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Categories: Fiber Networks · Telecom Equipment