100G technology makes its debut in Central America

Details: James Barton; Category: Wireless Networks; 17 May 2012; 10649 views

A major Central American wholesale provider has upgraded its Panamanian network to incorporate 100G optical channel technology...

A major Central American wholesale provider has upgraded its Panamanian network to incorporate 100G optical channel technology. Using a platform provided by Xtera, Colombus Networks has bolstered its network capacity in Panama by deploying an optical ring network between Maria Chiquita and Plaza Obario, Panama City.

The deployment of 100G technology is the first in the Pan-American Caribbean region. The upgrade allows the operator to meet increasing demands from emerging cloud services, data centre operations and other high-capacity content distribution services.

"The global build-out of data centres, coupled with rapid deployment of cloud based services, are driving renewed demand for ever higher fixed and burst rate connections and emphasis on high availability through redundancy,” said Peter Collins, Chief Technology Officer at Columbus Networks, adding “our Panama Network uses the latest platform from Xtera and we noticed they have been very active in the deployment of 100G networks around the world.”

Being the first and only 100G equipment in the field since the second half of 2011 with soft-decision Forward Error Correction (FEC), Xtera’s Nu-Wave OptimaTM offers an advanced 100G solution for multiple optical networking applications. For terrestrial backbone networks, the equipment delivers a line capacity of 15 Tb/s on more than 3,000 km. For unrepeatered applications, a capacity of 34 x 100G was recently transmitted over a cable attenuation exceeding 74 dB.

“Today, 100G technology offers a compelling combination of performance and price for efficient high-capacity optical networking,” reported Herve Fevrier, EVP and COO of Xtera. “We were more than happy to introduce the technology to the region.”