Bharti expands i2i submarine cable with Ciena

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Ciena Corp. announced that i2i, a venture of Bharti Airtel Limited, has completed a submarine network upgrade spanning from India to Singapore using Ciena's converged packet optical and network management solutions.

The upgrade leverages a flexible 100G ROADM-based infrastructure that has enabled Bharti to increase capacity over the i2i cable and respond to a surging demand for high-bandwidth data services driven by both enterprise applications and an increasing use of mobile bandwidth across the region.

Ciena's network management solutions bring expanded intelligence to the i2i cable, delivering rapid service turn-up & proactive fault recovery, features that are critical to managing a high-performance submarine link.

i2i is a submarine cable owned by Bharti Airtel Limited of India. The high-capacity cable spans 3,200 kilometers and connects Singapore and Chennai, India.

Powered by Ciena's 6500 Packet-Optical Platform, equipped with the WaveLogic 3 processors, this submarine upgrade leveraged a combination of coherent optical technology and wavelength selective switching to enable rapid remote configuration of traffic across the i2i cable. A commitment to intelligent and scalable network designs, both key elements of Ciena's OPn architecture, allowed i2i to implement this upgrade quickly, ensuring that new capacity was ready and available according to Bharti's customers' demand.

With Ciena's OneControl Unified Management System, i2i also benefits from simple point-and-click service provisioning to enable faster service turn-up and end-to-end visibility of network performance. OneControl also allows i2i to meet the demanding service level agreements of wholesale clients and perform rapid remote troubleshooting in the event of a network outage.