News Article
Infinera awarded for global telecoms business innovation
In its collaboration with Interoute, Infinera which uses indium phosphide technology in its PICs, won the award for its contribution to high capacity European networks.
Infinera and Interoute won the “Wholesale Service Innovation” award at the Global Telecoms Business Awards.
The award recognises Interoute’s innovation as one of the world’s first telecom operators to offer a revenue-generating OTN service to a customer. Interoute used the Digital OTN capabilities of its deployed Infinera DTN-based network to deliver the services.
The prestigious award was accepted by Matthew Finnie, Interoute’s Chief Technology Officer, and Chris Champion, Infinera’s Vice President of Sales EMEA at a Tuesday evening awards ceremony in London attended by more than 300 people from the global telecom industry.
Infinera introduced the DTN platform in 2004 and the firm says it is still the industry’s first and only solution that integrates Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) directly with OTN switching through the use of the Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) which incorporates InP.
This pioneering integration of DWDM and OTN enabled the Digital Optical Network to remove many of the challenges found in traditional analogue optical networks. OTN (Optical Transport Network) is a set of industry standards that enable service reconfigurability and transparent network performance monitoring throughout the network.
In September 2010, Infinera enhanced its OTN capabilities with the introduction of new client interfaces that enabled OTN services (such as ODU1) to be handed off to non-Infinera networks. With Infinera’s Digital Optical Network and OTN capabilities at the core of its pan-European network, Interoute is able to deliver high-capacity connections to multiple organisations on the same fibre, which can be turned up quickly to meet customer demand. The Interoute-Infinera partnership also allows for the delivery of clear channel wavelength links, especially useful for wholesale services needing to carry both bandwidth and management traffic.
“We are thrilled to have had our wholesale services recognised by this award,” said Matthew Finnie, CTO at Interoute. “Interoute’s network is used by all the major incumbents, and is increasingly attractive to operators in the service provider market looking to outsource part or all of their European networks. We continue to invest in the scale and reach of our European network, and Infinera’s Digital Optical Networks architecture, including its Digital OTN features, plays a key part in allowing us to deliver cost-effective, high-capacity networks to our customers in very short time frames.”
“We are very pleased to share this award with Interoute,” said Chris Champion, Infinera Vice-President of Sales for EMEA. “Interoute continues to be an industry leader and is playing a pioneering role by leveraging Infinera’s OTN capabilities to offer these services on a commercial basis. This is an important innovation which will help the industry move to the next generation of services while offering customers end-to-end transparent services.”
In presenting the Awards, Alan Burkitt-Gray, editor of Global Telecoms Business, commented, “This is the fifth time we’ve run the Global Telecoms Business Innovation Awards and this year we saw more nominations, from a greater range of operators and vendors, than ever before.
“This is a sure sign the industry is working harder and harder to deliver exciting and innovative services to customers worldwide. Congratulations to all of this year’s award winners and to Infinera and Interoute for their wholesale high capacity network.”
