COMPTEL: ECI lands Caribbean fiber deal

ORLANDO – Triton Telecom, a unit of Cobian International Group, will use ECI Telecom’s optical and Ethernet gear to build the first direct submarine cable links between Miami and Puerto Rico, and between Miami and the Dominican Republic. The network will also connect Puerto Rico and the Dominican directly, as well as Jamaica.

The new multi-million project will serve a region with 31% annual growth in IP traffic to deliver IP-MPLS services, video services, cellular services and WiMAX, said Joanne Negron, CEO and chief engineer of Cobian.

“This is the first direct submarine optical cable link between Miami and Puerto Rico – it’s a 1900 kilometer link between Miami and Puerto Rico, and a 1900 kilometer link between Miami and the Dominican,” Cobian said. “That’s important because all the service providers in the area come through these islands.”

Triton Telecom chose Carrier Ethernet as its service platform because of customer demand. In pre-selling, Negron said, “our largest customers asked us to provide Ethernet.” Triton is using ECI’s 9000 Carrier Ethernet Switch Router and its XDM Multi-Service Provisioning Platform, both of which are part of ECI’s 1Net business framework to enable migration to next-generation networks.”

ECI is seeing growing demand for its products in the Caribbean and in the Central America/Latin America region.

“With deregulation, we are seeing a lot of new players in this region,” said Wayne Walters, director of product marketing for ECI. “There is a lot of wireless growth in particular.”

WiMAX is particularly popular, Negron said, because it is easy and less expensive to deploy. “Everyone is playing with WiMAX,” she said. “It is a lot cheaper to implement versus grooming your GSM network to provide more bandwidth. With one tower, you can get a service up and running, and you can do it as an overlay.”