Infinera platform delivers 100Gbps for Midcontinent
Infinera and the telecommunications company Midcontinent Communications have announced that Midcontinent has deployed the Infinera DTN-X packet optical transport networking platform in its Upper Midwest service area of the US to deliver cable television, high-speed Internet and telecom services to its customers.
Midcontinent has more than 300,000 residential and business customers in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin. It operates a 7,800 fibre-mile network delivering services to urban and rural areas.
The Infinera DTN-X platform enables Midcontinent to deliver capacity with 100 gigabit per second (Gb/s) coherent transmission today using 500 Gb/s super-channels, with a forward-scale design to support in-service migration to terabit super-channels in the future.
The high capacity channels are enabled by 500 Gb/s photonic integrated circuits (PICs) developed and fabricated by Infinera, which claims to be the only supplier delivering 500 Gb/s of transmission capacity from a single line card today.
PICs enable the DTN-X platform to integrate dense wavelength division multiplexing super-channel transmission with 5 Tb/s of non-blocking optical transport network switching today, and 12 Tb/s in the future. The result is seamless scaling for Midcontinent as traffic requirements grow in the future.
"As we enhanced our network, we once again selected Infinera because we had already realized the benefits from our existing Intelligent Transport Network with the DTN platform," said Jon Pederson, vice president of technology at Midcontinent Communications. "The DTN-X was easy to install. It took our team only three weeks to deploy services, allowing Midcontinent to offer services quickly to customers."
"We are pleased that Midcontinent is extending the benefits of the Infinera Intelligent Transport Network as the company expands," said Gaylord Hart, director of marketing, MSO market at Infinera. "The DTN-X platform offers cable operators the benefits of scalability, ease of use and superb reliability."
Based in California, Infinera is a maker of InP photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and systems based on them.
