contact button
May 3, 2016

Guest Blog: Choose Your Allies Carefully

MattiasFridstrom 2016By Mattias Fridström

CTO – Telia Carrier

We all know that Internet traffic is growing every day. In my role as CTO at Telia Carrier, it is crucial to constantly stay on top of this growth and review where we need to expand or size up our network, how we operate it, and what type of equipment we use.

Last week, Telia Carrier and Infinera announced the extension of Telia Carrier’s North American optical network to bring 100 gigabit per second (100 Gb/s) services into one of our metro markets with the Infinera TM-Series. Now, you might ask: why have we done this and is there a strategic reason behind it? And most importantly in this forum, why did we do this together with Infinera?

Well, to start with, we didn’t only bring 100G into the metro market, we also added another low latency “Pacific Coast Highway” route between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. The simple reason behind this is Telia Carrier’s commitment to our customers. As our ambition is to deliver the best connectivity to all of our end customers, we believe this expansion will vastly increase customer experience.

As our CEO Brendan Ives once said, “If customers even notice their network, it’s because it’s letting them down.” 100G is about letting us stay invisible as a carrier. It gives our customers the instant scalability they need to keep their end-users immersed.

By providing market-leading latency and redundancy between Silicon Valley and the Pacific cable landing points in Los Angeles, Telia Carrier not only enhances connectivity between the two major West Coast media, entertainment and Internet hubs but also clears an additional path for Asia-Pacific traffic entering and leaving the U.S. via key submarine cable landing stations on the West Coast. It’s a global world we live in, and even if we act locally we need to think globally.

To do this with Infinera comes very naturally. For many years, we have selected Infinera to develop and expand our U.S. network, and now have deployed Infinera’s TM-Series for metro 100G services. We often talk about choosing our allies carefully. That’s exactly what we have done here. Expanding our collaboration with Infinera into the metro area provides us with the end-to-end control we need. Thanks to Infinera we can continue our growth story in the U.S. and at the same time focus on becoming “The Backbone of Your Business.”

Curious about how we build our network? Visit our webpage to find out more.

Legal Disclaimer

This guest blog was written by Mattias Fridström, Chief Technology Officer of Telia Carrier. Infinera thanks him for his contribution.