Wholesale Carriers

Wholesale bandwidth providers are now enjoying huge revenue growth driven by demand for higher speed broadband and IPTV services. However, as pure bandwidth providers they face the problem that their primary product is a commodity. In a competitive market, costs have to be driven down and the ability to deliver service faster than the competition may be their only differentiator.

The Infinera Solution

Wholesale carriers will see a number of advantages from an Infinera solution:

• For these carriers, the ability to roll out huge amounts of capacity is paramount. 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.

• Wholesale carriers are typically offering pure bandwidth services, and these have tended to become commodities in recent years. The one remaining differentiator for them is the speed at which new services can be deployed. Since spare capacity is very easy and cost effective to maintain in the Digital Optical Network, it also becomes simple to add tributary access capacity upon demand by the customer. Infinera has removed this problem for our customers by pioneering our Just in TAM™ solution. This removes the need for carriers to maintain expensive stockpiles of equipment, and yet they retain the ability to deliver new services quickly and easily.

• This kind of customer still has a strong, growing demand for SONET/SDH services, but is seeing a rapidly increasing requirement for Ethernet and SAN-based services. Infinera has the most comprehensive set of service functions that are all driven by the intelligence of the Digital Optical Network.

• Wholesale carriers have stayed in business by cutting costs to the bone. The Digital Optical Network can be installed and operated using a fraction of the staff needed for an equivalent conventional network. And an Infinera network requires only a fraction of the Field Replaceable Units (ie. "spare parts" compared to a conventional optical network built from discrete components.

• GMPLS-based Embedded Software Intelligence provides a host of advantages, including automated inventory management, automated topology discovery, point and click provisioning and flexible service protection and restoration. Shared protection bandwidth can be used to create new service categories of "unprotected wavelengths with rapid repair capability".

• Infinera's integrated bandwidth management means that a wholesale carrier can deploy protection switching without the need to buy external optical cross connects.

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© 2008 Infinera Corporation.