Mar 30, 2010 3:12 PM,

Nokia Siemens Networks wins XO 40Gig transport deal

By Rich Karpinski

In a week when the carrier launched new 40 Gb/s services, the vendor won a deal to put its DWDM platform into the XO network to help deliver future bandwidth requirements.

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Nokia Siemens Networks announced a deal today to provide 40 Gb/s DWDM platforms to help XO scale up network capacity, in one of the vendor’s biggest 40gig transport wins to date.

In a multiyear deal, NSN will supply its hiT 7300 DWDM 40 Gb/s platform to XO, with the ability to extend it to 80 x 40G (or 3.2 terabits) as well as to ultimately pave the way to 100G optical transport.

The win comes as XO earlier this week announced two new 40 Gb/s network services across its U.S. footprint: 40 Gb/s point-to-point wavelength service and 40 Gb/s IP transit service for aggregating large amounts of Internet-based traffic. While those services, available today, aren’t offered over the NSN transport fabric (which has yet to be deployed), such new XO service offerings are driving the need for the service provider to scale up its infrastructure, an XO spokesman said.

For NSN, the XO deal is its largest 40Gig win on its hiT 7300 platform; other big wins have come on its hiT 7500 platform. The vendor announced another 40G deal last week on the 7300 with Columbus Networks in Florida, which provides undersea fiber optic connections into the Caribbean and Latin America. NSN has been busy on the optical front of late, launching a new OTN switch while also demonstrating a version of the hiT 7300 with coherent 40 Gb/s transponder electronics.

Look for XO to use the greater transport capacity to deliver high-capacity 10 Gb/s and 40 Gb/s long-haul and aggregation services – classic long-haul applications, said Hans-Jurgen Schmidtke, head of NSN's fixed network operator business in North America, in an interview. Schmidtke said his company’s ability to leverage its 40 Gb/s field experience – as well as differentiate on network design, overall network cost efficiency and an upgrade path to 100 Gb/s – helped it seal the deal.

“The DWDM market isn’t a commodity market yet,” he said. “You can still differentiate on performance, time to market, design and making the network cost-effective.”