Sidera Networks announced Tuesday that MetroCast, one of its regional cable operator customers, has upgraded its 10G connections to 100G wavelengths to deal with its growing consumer and business customer traffic.
MetroCast serves over 200 communities in the Northeast and the South. The new 100G wavelengths will deliver services to two of the MSO's network routes: Rochester, N.Y., to Boston, and Ashburn, Va., to Leonardtown, Md.
For this deployment, Sidera is extending its 100G network to backhaul all of MetroCast's consumer video and Internet and its business service traffic, including Ethernet.
"We've had a 100G network running for a while with these guys, but we were making sure it was running and running well and doing all of the things it was doing correctly," said Joe Cumello, VP of marketing for Sidera, in an interview with FierceTelecom.
MetroCast had already deployed 10G wavelengths from Sidera, and will now upgrade specific routes to 100G. Similar to other service providers migrating to 100G, Sidera was able to make the switch to 100G on its existing Ciena (Nasdaq: CIEN) 6500 platform.
"We're turning those managed 10 Gig to 100 Gig," said Cumello. "A lot of the equipment vendors are moving in that direction where it shouldn't be that difficult to move between these different speeds."
A key point of Sidera's connection with MetroCast is it will provide transport connectivity to peering points at data centers where Sidera has connected its fiber network in Ashburn, Va., a vital content hub, and Boston. The service provider is a key enabler of data centers, providing necessary fiber connections into about 125 data centers throughout the Northeast and in Chicago.
Virginia, in particular, has been a big growth target for Sidera, as it's the third largest content hub in the world. Last October, the service provider began a network buildout to extend its fiber network from Chantilly, Va., to other major cities including Richmond, Newport News and Roanoke. The company also plans to connect into southern states such as North and South Carolina.
Cumello said Sidera's presence in Virginia will likely attract content providers that are showing interest in purchasing wholesale 100G wavelength services.
"It should be no surprise that the content guys are very interested in 100 Gig technologies," he said. "It has a lot to do with the raw volume of data, so besides Research and Education and cable companies, the content guys are excited about this."
MetroCast is the second sizeable 100G network customer Sidera has signed up in recent months. The service provider has also established a growing presence in the Research and Education (R&E) market, an early advocate of 100G fiber-based networking.
Sidera supplied its 100G network to the Global LambdaGrid event held in the Global Lambda Integrated Facility, an international consortium that promotes the use of optical lambda networking. During this event a consortium of researchers, including some from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, demonstrated an optical fiber-based network testbed that was established to develop 100G services and technologies for next gen "petascale science."
"We were the 100G network behind the 'petascale' demos with NASA and GLIF conducted last October," Cumello said. "We have been fairly active in this space, especially on the supercomputing and R&E side, but have not publicized a lot of it."
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