ORLANDO, Fla.--INDATEL, a group of wholesale carriers that have their roots in the rural telecom market, is tuning its network to 100G, selecting Cyan's Z-Series packet-optical transport platform (P-OTP) and the Blue Planet SDN software.
Max Huffman, COO of INDATEL, told FierceTelecom its overriding goal is about helping network members scale their capabilities.
The increased transport capacity enables INDATEL to deliver services across its Rural Ethernet eXchange (REX).
"What we're trying to do is leverage everything and anything that makes sense and has the power of scale," Huffman said. "INDATEL is all about scaling national opportunity across this network of networks with our 26 member affiliates across the United States that are focused on making sure their RLEC owner's needs are met."
By making the switch to 100G, INDATEL said that it has improved aggregation and scale for its carrier members to enable more "efficient and cost-effective service delivery."
"What's driving bandwidth is an Internet of multiple ever-changing things and 100G connectivity is part of that equation," Huffman said. "Many of our members have active DWDM systems that are carrying 100G-plus capable architectures today and Cyan is a big player in that space and is a great partner with us, but the common denominator is that 100G will soon be a baseline."
With over 42 percent of U.S. buildings (according to Vertical Systems Group) connected to fiber, INDATEL and its member companies want to get a piece of that growing pie.
Being an aggregator, INDATEL can help its member companies get access to national opportunities.
"What we do is seek out national opportunities that would have not been otherwise made available to our members on a statewide basis necessarily," Huffman said. "We're looking at national relationships and opportunities that are looking at multi-state, multi-location customer location opportunities that we can help bridge that across this network."
One particular national opportunity that INDATEL would like to play a part is the General Service Administration's (GSA) Network Services 2020 (NS 2020) contract, the follow on to the multi-billion Networx telecom contract for federal government agencies. Unlike Networx, the GSA wants to encourage multiple players besides the largest carriers like AT&T (NYSE: T), CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL), and Verizon (NYSE: VZ) to participate.
"Network 2020 is coming down and there's a lot of positioning there," Huffman said.
While 100G is the initial focus of this deployment, the Z-Series has a 96-channel, multi-degree ROADM capable of transporting up to 10 Tbps on a single fiber.
This means that INDATEL can scale to higher capacities when it is needed for future needs. Being a nearly 40-year telecom industry veteran, Huffman said that he's seeing some of its legacy fiber members carrying both 100G and even faster speeds.
"There's some early 1980s fiber out there that's carrying 100G today and there's some tests out there with much broader speeds than that," Huffman said.
For more:
- see the release
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