Allstream seeks capacity, cost-effectiveness with 100 Gb/s network upgrade

Canadian fiber network operator Allstream announced yesterday that it will use coherent optical equipment from Ciena to upgrade its nationwide network to support 100 Gb/s data transport. Allstream is a division of MTS Allstream, a wholly owned subsidiary of Manitoba Telecom Services.

Allstream said the move was made in response to customer demand for higher speed wavelength services to facilitate data center connectivity, storage replication, cloud services and other bandwidth-intensive applications and services.

“Ciena’s coherent technology can be customized to meet specific applications,” said Helen Xenos, portfolio solutions advisor at Ciena in an email to Connected Planet. For example, she said the company’s coherent receivers can be easily tuned to provide colorless ROADM functionality.

Ciena exec: Coherent optics key to cost-effectiveness
Among the reasons Allstream decision-makers said they chose Ciena was that they believed the company’s product would support cost-effective performance, resiliency, capacity and scale.

Coherent optics (CP: Ciena expands use of coherent optical processing) are key to the cost-effectiveness of the Ciena solution, said Xenos. Allstream, she said, will gain the ability “to extend the life of the existing network and infrastructure to avoid new fiber and network builds by carrying increased amounts of traffic over existing assets.”

Operators such as Allstream also can achieve a lower cost-per-bit by carrying ten times more traffic on their existing 10 Gb/s infrastructure using the same spectrum they have today at less than 10 times the cost, Xenos said.

“100G wavelengths also allow operators to quickly activate 10G end services, which is becoming the new service currency in networks today,” said Xenos. “Once the 100G wavelength is set up across the network, all [network operators] have to do is insert the appropriate pluggable optic to activate the new 10G or 10 GE services they want to carry across the network.”

Operationally, the use of Ciena’s equipment reduces space and power consumption, Xenos said, adding, “Deploying larger wavelengths means that there are [fewer] wavelengths to manage in the network, thus simplifying network management.”