Farice upgrades FARICE-1 submarine network with Ciena GeoMesh

Ciena Corp. (NASDAQ: CIEN) says that Farice, a provider of international capacity from Iceland to mainland Europe, has deployed Ciena’s 100G coherent optical transport technology to upgrade its FARICE-1 submarine fiber-optic cable system connecting Iceland and Scotland.

This deployment builds on an earlier agreement between the two companies to enhance Farice’s submarine cable system DANICE, which connects Iceland with Denmark. The DANICE upgrade was completed in January 2013 (see “Iceland’s Farice upgrades submarine and terrestrial networks via Ciena”).

Ciena says Farice is the main provider of wholesale capacity in and out of Iceland, and operates a city-to-city network in five European countries. The network is optimized for delivery of wholesale capacity to service providers, content providers, cloud service providers, and data center customers.

Farice has selected Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform, powered by 100G WaveLogic 3 coherent optical processors, and GeoMesh optical bypass for deployment on the 1200-km FARICE-1 submarine cable system as well as almost 800 km of terrestrial backhaul network where Ciena equipment provides the alien wavelength. This will provide high-bandwidth connectivity between Reykjavik and Keflavik, Iceland to Dunnet Bay, Scotland. It will also enable Farice to provide high-speed, reliable, and flexible on-demand service delivery.

Ciena asserts that through use of converged packet-optical transport technology and the system provider’s GeoMesh architecture, Farice will be able to satisfy the growing and unpredictable bandwidth demands of both its traditional telecommunications carrier customers, as well as the rapidly growing Icelandic data center industry.

Ciena says its GeoMesh architecture incorporates an all-optical network design to connect submarine and terrestrial segments into a single seamless link, with high-capacity optical signals carried as alien wavelengths over the existing terrestrial backhaul network, reducing capital and operational expenses – savings that allow Farice to offer its customers more competitive prices. By using the same technologies over land and undersea, Farice can efficiently interconnect its points of presence and service switching centers, with end-to-end service provisioning to make the global network operate as a single, unified network, Ciena says. Additionally, GeoMesh’s simplified all-optical design delivers lower power consumption, therefore supporting Iceland’s green data center goals, while also supporting lower latency to improve connectivity between Iceland’s data centers and the rest of the world, according to the systems house.

Farice will also leverage Ciena’s management system for simplified low-touch service activation, which provides rapid service delivery, comprehensive service visualization and network monitoring.

“To serve the needs of our growing data center and traditional telecommunications customers, we need to be able to offer maximum bandwidth, lower latencies and seamless scalability, while maintaining our higher uptimes. After extensive lab and field testing, it was clear that Ciena’s coherent optical technology and GeoMesh solution is the best option to meet our requirements because we can leverage our existing assets,” said Örn Orrason, vice president of sales and business development at Farice.

Ciena is exhibiting at Submarine Networks World 2013 in Singapore this week in booth A7.

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