Airbus North America picks Global Internetworking to deliver WAN fiber ring
June 27, 2005 McLean, VA -- Airbus North America has selected Global Internetworking (GII), a facilities-neutral telecom carrier and network platforms provider, to design, deploy, and manage a high-capacity WAN fiber ring linking Airbus's North American headquarters and operations in the Washington, D.C. area with the company's nationwide and global high-capacity data transport network.
According to GII, the 2.488-Gbit/sec OC-48 self-healing fiber ring in the deployment will run Ethernet-over-SONET and provide Gigabit Ethernet service for Airbus's
data transport requirements supporting bandwidth-intensive engineering and operations applications. Under the agreement, GII says it will provide a managed network platform in which it will design and deploy the fiber ring, buy dark fiber, light the fiber with the appropriate equipment, and run, monitor, and manage the fiber ring's operation.
The fiber ring will connect the headquarters for Airbus North America and Airbus North America Customer Services, which are located in Herndon, Virginia, with an office in nearby Washington, D.C.; and with the Airbus spares center located in Ashburn, Virginia, which serves customers in the U.S., Canada and much of Latin America, and works in concert with Airbus spares facilities in Hamburg and Beijing.
High-capacity point-to-point circuits - currently provisioned by GII, linking Airbus North America operations in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area to Airbus facilities in Wichita, Kansas, and Miami, Florida - will interconnect with the new fiber ring, according to a press release. The Wichita, Kansas, facility is the location of Airbus's North Americam engineering operations. Miami is the location of Airbus's 100,000-square-foot training center. The fiber ring will also directly interconnect with Airbus's global headquarters in Toulouse, France, and with Airbus procurement, engineering, manufacturing, and training operations in Toulouse; Filton, England; and Hamburg, Germany.
"The new managed network and fiber ring solution that GII is providing will help improve the performance and resilience of our network's ability to support mission critical business applications," comments Charles Fletcher, vice president of information services for Airbus North America.
GII says the agreement also marks the launch of its Managed Network Services offering for custom network designs. The company says the service cost-effectively addresses enterprises' requirements for the delivery of turnkey WAN platforms supporting advanced data networking, MPLS, Ethernet, and Voice over IP applications.