Incumbent Carriers

Incumbent carriers were often the big winners after the telecom "nuclear winter" of the early 2000s because they were able to survive the downturn, thanks to a more established service portfolio and greater financial resources.

Incumbents are now enjoying spectacular bandwidth growth, mostly fuelled by residential broadband rollouts and the insatiable bandwidth demand from enterprise customers. Like other parts of the market, consolidation and acquisition is driving the need to interconnect regional backbones at very high speeds.

The Infinera Solution

Infinera offers a wide range of advantages for Incumbent carriers:

• Infinera offers the highest density and most scalable optical networking solution available today. With 800Gb/s of totally flexible add/drop capacity per rack, no other vendor can come close. And Infinera line cards add capacity in 100Gb/s increments, at a fraction of the cost of equivalent discrete optical equipment.

• Incumbent operators typically have rapidly growing metro optical networks — driven by broadband backhaul and IPTV deployments. Infinera's Digital ROADM solution can be used in the metro, regional and long haul environment to create a seamless, Digital Optical Network.

• A broad range of optical transport services is required, with speeds ranging from Gigabit Ethernet through to 40Gb/s SONET/SDH, and in the future 100 Gigabit Ethernet. These can be added quickly and easily to the Infinera backbone using our Just in TAM™ capability.

• Incumbent operators often have a wide variety of fiber types and quality in their networks, which can lead to problems implementing higher speed services such as 40Gb/s (and even 10Gb/s in some cases). Infinera's Digital ROADM technology means that a full "5R regeneration" is performed at every hop in the network. Fiber impairments are simply not allowed to accumulate, and the end result is that Infinera networks are far more tolerant to issues such as high Polarization Mode Dispersion (PMD) fiber. In addition, Infinera's Open Transport Service capability means that services like 40Gb/s and even 100GE can run over the same 10Gb/s infrastructure that's being used today.

• Incumbent operators generally set the standard for the reliability of optical transport services in their respective region. Infinera's Digital Optical Network has access to full SDH-like Performance Management and OAM capabilities. These are used to provide true "sub 50ms" optical protection. But Infinera's protection options don't stop there. Using our Embedded Software Intelligence (based on GMPLS) a carrier can exploit shared protection schemes to maximize service availability from a given set of bandwidth resources. Reliability also comes in the form of our unique PIC technology, which eliminates over 95% of fiber couplings in a typical system.

• Infinera equipment is designed for easy integration into existing OSS and management systems thanks to our comprehensive support for CORBA, XML and other management standards.

Back to Top >>

© 2008 Infinera Corporation.