Network News: Hurricane Picks Zayo for 100G Backbone

Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the network industry:

Zayo selected by Hurricane Electric for 100G backbone.  Zayo Group announced that Hurricane Electric Internet Services has purchased 100G wavelength services on Zayo's newly installed 100G routes. The upgraded routes include New York to Washington, D.C. and Chicago to Memphis. Hurricane Electric is connected to 60 major exchange points and exchanges traffic directly with more than 2,700 different networks, and the 100G routes will help create greater per Gigabit cost efficiencies relative to prior service deployments. "Installation of our newly implemented 100G Wave system along major U.S. routes allows Zayo to leverage the latest generation technology to meet the capacity demands of customers like Hurricane Electric," says Zach Nebergall, Vice President of Waves Product Group at Zayo. "This service delivers increased capacity and cost efficiency, as well as improved latency through the latest technology."

Ciena selected by XO for video transport solution.  Ciena (CIEN) announced that XO Communications will use Ciena’s Digital Video Transport solution to deliver native digital video transport services to media and entertainment customers across the XO nationwide network. With XO Communications’ coast-to-coast 100G network, the Ciena solution will allow XO to cost-effectively transport high-definition video content for its customers without affecting original quality. The solution  includes the 565 Advanced Services Platform, a compact and cost-optimized metro WDM platform that enables a variety of data, storage and video services to be cost-efficiently aggregated onto an optical wavelength-based network or service.The Digital Video Transport solution will be deployed in conjunction with other Ciena platforms in the XO network. “In the media and entertainment industry, uptime, video quality, and secure, high-speed service delivery are critical," said Francois Locoh-Donou, senior vice president, Global Products group at Ciena. "Ciena’s highly reliable, scalable and flexible optical platforms, part of our OPN programmable network architecture, address the specific requirements of native digital video transport. We’re pleased to help XO Communications deliver a secure and reliable solution so that they can quickly and cost-effectively send bandwidth-intensive, high quality video between geographically dispersed teams.”

Alcatel-Lucent and Shaw trial 400G.  Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) and Canadian operator Shaw Communications have achieved a milestone with the successful first field trial in North America of 400 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) data transmission over an existing optical link carrying live network traffic. The trial ran over a 400 kilometre route between Calgary and Edmonton in Alberta, Canada, using Shaw’s current high-capacity transport network, designed for speeds up to 100 Gbps. Using Alcatel-Lucent’s 400 Gbps technology, the trial demonstrated the ability of an existing optical network carrying up to 17.6 Terabits-per-second (Tbps). “With the growing appetite for services and the proliferation over many different devices, including tablets and connected devices, we were looking for next-generation technologies to help us build a world-leading infrastructure capable of keeping up with broadband demands," said Peter Bissonnette, President, Shaw Communications Inc. "Alcatel-Lucent’s 400 Gbps technology enables us to continue our leadership within the telecommunications industry and reinforce our commitment to maintaining leading-edge high-speed Internet capability.”