RCom ties-up with Ciena to upgrade 100G cable NW

BANGALORE, INDIA: Networking company Ciena Corporation announced that it has partnered with communications service provider Reliance Globalcom, which is the undersea cable unit of Anil Ambani's Reliance Communications, to upgrade the latter's FLAG Europe-Asia (FEA) submarine network.

"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. We are already using Ciena coherent solutions to deliver 40G services on multiple, critical submarine routes, so when we decided to upgrade our FEA route to 100G, we knew Ciena was the right choice to help strengthen our leadership position and differentiate our network capabilities," said Punit Garg, president and CEO, Reliance Globalcom.

Ciena's WaveLogic coherent optical 100G networking architecture will help Reliance Globalcom in increasing the capacity of the 100G network, that connects Egypt and Jordan, so that it supports cloud computing, video conferencing, business continuity/disaster recovery, data center connectivity, and storage area networking, in addition to ever increasing Internet traffic.

As part of the network upgrade, Reliance Globalcom will deploy a 100G DWDM system with Ciena's 6500 packet-optical platform equipped with WaveLogic coherent optical line interfaces.

The network upgrade with 100G technology allows Reliance Globalcom to increase submarine bandwidth on this segment by 10 times, and enables the launch of 10GE and OTU-2 services. The upgrade also enables Reliance Globalcom to provide 100GbE for their end customers as required, says a release.

Ciena is also providing Reliance Globalcom with its network management solution for streamlined service activation, fault management and performance monitoring.

"Ciena's submarine network solutions are designed to fit into existing wet plants to significantly increase submarine network capacity without disrupting existing customer traffic or adding cost and complexity to the network. Our solutions are ideally suited for large submarine networks like Reliance Globalcom that play an important role in ensuring continuous global broadband connectivity, and thus cannot afford downtime for network build-out and service turn-up," said Anthony McLachlan, vice president and general manager, Asia Pacific, Ciena.