Telia Carrier taps Infinera for new West Coast route, US metro needs

Telia Carrier says it has begun deployment of a second fiber-optic network route between the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles based on DTN-X packet-optical transport systems from Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN). The company also is opening a metro fiber ring around the San Francisco Bay Area using Infinera's TM-Series, marking the systems house's status as Telia Carrier's preferred supplier of 100-Gbps metro optical transport systems in North America.

The company, the fiber-optic network services provider arm of Telia and formerly known as TeliaSonera International Carrier, is adding four points of presence in Santa Clara and one in San Francisco as part of the deployment, according to Ivo Pascucci, Telia Carrier's director of sales for the Americas Region. The link will provide a 30% reduction in latency versus the existing route as well as increased diversity between the two endpoints. The deployment will address increased demand for high-speed capacity between the two areas in California, particularly among Asian content and communication services suppliers connecting to North America via any of the several trans-Pacific submarine cable networks that land in the state.

Telia Carrier will lease dark fiber under 20-year IRUs to link the systems together, Pascucci said.

Telia and Infinera have a long history together in North America and elsewhere (see, for example, "TeliaSonera taps Infinera for US network" and "Infinera demos superchannel SD-FEC with TeliaSonera International Carrier"). According to Mike Capuano, vice president of marketing at Infinera, the deployment represents a milestone for the systems house in that it's the first publicly announced extension of a DTN-X long-haul network to the metro using the TM-Series, which came to Infinera with the acquisition of Transmode (see "Infinera looks to metro with Transmode buy"). Capuano admitted that there have been other examples of DTN-X/TM-Series pairings that haven't been announced, but nothing on the scale the Telia Carrier deployment represents.

While Infinera has discussed the possibility of adding photonic integrated circuits (PICs) to the TM-Series to tighten the integration of the systems into a DTN-X based network ecosystem, Capuano said the Telia Carrier deployment instead will use a software-based integration approach using Infinera's Digital Node Administrator (DNA) network management system and software-defined networking (SDN) friendly APIs.

Meanwhile, Telia Carrier was known to be close to deciding on a 100-Gbps metro optical systems supplier early last year. Asked if the use of the Infinera system means the company won that competition, Pascucci said that Infinera was indeed his company's preferred metro systems supplier for North America. But he added that he could not comment on metro systems choices for other parts of Telia Carrier's network.

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