Ericsson/Ciena venture succeeds with Telstra

The collaboration between Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) and Ciena (NYSE: CIEN) has borne its first fruits, a deal with Australian national incumbent carrier Telstra. Ericsson has announced that it will continue to supply optical transport equipment and services to Telstra, and that the supply agreement will include Ciena’s 6500 and 5400 packet-optical transport systems. The agreement will also help set up Telstra's network to leverage software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) techniques.

"We want to have one of the world's best optical networks and this agreement will provide us with the ability to dynamically move and shape transport capacity with the flexibility and scalability to streamline our network operations," said David Robertson, director transport and routing, engineering, at Telstra. "This will help us ensure a consistent satisfactory customer experience, despite the demands for high traffic across different parts of the transport network.

"The continued improvement of Telstra's optical technology will increase bandwidth capacity and also lower latency which is of growing importance as more and more operations move to the cloud," Robertson added.

The evolution toward SDN and NFV is an important part of the new deal, according to Ericsson. "We have worked with Telstra over a number of years to pilot the latest cloud networking technologies incorporating SDN and NFV. The new agreement with Telstra ensures that we can begin to introduce this functionality into the Telstra transport network throughout Australia," said Håkan Eriksson, head of Ericsson Australia and New Zealand.

Ericsson and Ciena signed a collaboration agreement this past February that covered the development of SDN and NFV capabilities for their respective platforms. The agreement also allows Ericsson to market Ciena’s packet-optical transport systems as part of its optical networking equipment portfolio (see "Ericsson, Ciena pair on packet-optical transport, SDN development").

"More so than ever, we're seeing the value of an ecosystem model prove out as the transition continues toward networks that scale and adapt to network-level applications and services," said Philippe Morin, senior vice president of worldwide sales and field operations at Ciena. "We are delivering on that promise through our partnership with Ericsson, bringing customers best-in-class solutions that address the evolving requirements for open, programmable, software-defined networks."

For more information on packet-optical platforms and suppliers, visit the Lightwave Buyer’s Guide.