Ciena helps VSNL, Tata Tele build optical mesh network

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Ciena Corp. the network specialist, announced that VSNL, India's leading communications solutions provider and member of the US $29 billion Tata Group, has deployed Ciena’s CoreDirector multiservice optical switches to create the first nationwide intelligent optical mesh network in India.

Fully operational with live customer traffic, the network enables VSNL to offer its customers maximum network reliability and service agility using automated service restoration and provisioning. The new network will also be used by Tata Teleservices (TTSL), one of India’s premier mobile and fixed service providers.

As a leading international communications provider in one of the fastest growing telecom markets in the world, where teledensity is expected to more than double by the end of 2008, VSNL’s new backbone network features a fully-meshed architecture throughout India. The mesh design enables the network to survive multiple failures caused by either natural disasters or man-made issues, such as accidental fiber cuts.

Based on CoreDirector’s industry-leading, standards-based control plane, VSNL’s mesh network automatically routes traffic around network failures based on its real-time knowledge of the network’s available bandwidth and ability to find the best alternate routes. Based on this network intelligence, Ciena’s CoreDirector restores traffic within milliseconds, instead of the hours or days typically involved in manual restorations.

A key element of Ciena’s FlexSelect Architecture and the global market leader in optical switching, CoreDirector is a multiservice, multiprotocol optical switching system that consolidates the functionality of a multiservice provisioning platform, digital cross-connect and Ethernet switch into a single, high-capacity intelligent switching system that not only improves network reliability but also can reduce network operator capex by as much as 65 percent and opex by as much as 85 percent.

The embedded intelligence of CoreDirector’s FlexSelect OS standards-based optical control plane provides 99.9999 percent reliability and real-time resource inventory discovery, databases synchronization, intelligent mapping of service requests to network resources and fully automated activation and deactivation of network resources.