Reliance Globalcom on Tuesday revealed that it has upgraded its FLAG Europe-Asia (FEA) submarine cable network, one it tried to take public earlier this year, to 100G.
Leveraging Ciena's (Nasdaq: CIEN) 6500 Packet Optical Network Platform (PONP), this update, which allows Reliance to use its existing fiber network infrastructure, is designed to increase capacity on a route that connects Egypt to Jordan.
With the 100G upgrade in place, Reliance Globalcom will be able to support all of the standard services it provides to enterprise and wholesale customers today such as cloud computing and data center connectivity. It also creates a foundation for the India-based provider to offer three new services, including 10GE, OTU-2 and 100 GbE for customers that are looking for these higher speeds.
Another element of the agreement with Ciena is that Reliance will get Ciena's management solution and professional services, including engineering, furnishing and installation (EF&I).
A key point of this deployment is that the company can leverage its existing infrastructure while meeting future customer needs as they arise.
"Ciena's proven coherent optical technology gives us the ability to upgrade our existing submarine networks from 10G to 40G and 100G rates, and beyond, so that we can keep pace with our customers' changing bandwidth requirements while leveraging our investments in fibre assets," said Punit Garg, president and CEO of Reliance Globalcom, in a release announcing the agreement with Ciena.
Last September, Reliance Globalcom worked with Ciena to upgrade its two key routes that span approximately 5,000 kilometers to connect Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong in addition to a 6,400 kilometer ultra-long haul submarine link connecting the UK, Spain, Italy and Egypt.
Reliance Globalcom has been one of Ciena's loyal customers for a number of years, and this latest network upgrade, in addition to others it recently won with XO Communications and Verizon (NYSE: VZ), illustrates that the vendor continues to be a major force in the 100G and overall WDM optical segment.
According to Dell'Oro's Q3 WDM report, Huawei, Ciena and Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) were the top three vendors. Overall, metro and long-haul WDM applications grew 14 percent year-over-year in Q3 2012, a factor related to the roll out of 40 and 100 gigabit DWDM wavelengths.
For more:
- see the release
Special report: In detail: Following the Packet Optical Transport Systems (P-OTS) evolution
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